The registrar of a regional court has slammed Kenya's failure to honour its decision to compensate the Ogiek community.
Robert Eno, the registrar of the African Court on Human and People’s Rights, said though the country has complied with some aspects of the court’s decisions, it has failed to compensate the indigenous group as ordered.
The court had found in 2017 that the state had violated the Ogiek’s rights when the government through KWS forcefully evicted them from Mau forest.
In 2022, the court awarded a total of Sh157 million as compensation to the community, including Sh57,850,000 for loss of property and natural resources, and Sh100 million for moral prejudice suffered at the hands of the government.
But the registrar said almost two years down the line, the state has yet to comply with the order on compensation.
While the court has jurisdiction over all states in the continent, it does not have mechanisms to enforce its decision.
“We rely on the goodwill of the countries to implement the decision of the court, including the decision on the Ogiek’s. Kenya has complied with the decision on recognising the community as indigenous but the compensation one remains outstanding.
“The Kenyan government has had quite a few cases brought against it. But it has not complied with the court’s decision in Ogiek’s case because we have not received a report from it to that effect,” Eno said.
He spoke to the Star on the sidelines of the dissemination of the African Governance Architecture Support Project, an initiative of the AU, held in Nairobi.
In February, 40 representatives of the Ogiek and Endorois indigenous communities in Kenya petitioned the office of the Attorney General, demanding the immediate implementation of the court decision.
They have been agitating for the payout as justice and reparations, including the return of their ancestral lands and respect of their rights.
Upon their eviction notice in October 2009, the Ogieks, through the Center for Minority Rights Development and Minority Rights Group International, complained to the African Commission on Human Rights.
They claimed the forest is their natural habitat which defined their way of lives and had their religious sites.
The commission then sued the government of Kenya in 2012, urging that a declaration be made that the community’s eviction was unlawful and violated their rights.
The commission also asked that they be recognised as a minority indigenous community that needed protection.
The court then ordered the Kenyan government to immediately reinstate the restrictions it had imposed on land transactions in the Mau Forest complex as a provisional measure, to prevent the Ogiek people from further irreparable harm while the case was being examined.
The 2017 decision said Kenyan authorities should not have expelled the Ogieks from their ancestral lands against their will and should not have been deprived of the food produced by these lands.
In doing so, it said, the state violated their right to land and their right to disposing of the wealth and natural resources of their land.
With the round one win, the community went back to the court, seeking that monetary relief be ordered against the state.
The Ogiek community comprises 20,000 members, about 15,000 of whom inhabit the greater Mau Forest complex.