Supreme Court Judge Isaac Lenaola has raised questions about Kenya's judicial online systems following an outage at a time when the impeachment proceedings of Former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua were being heard in court.
Speaking at the Regional Conference on the use of AI, Digital and Social media in elections in Kenya, held at a hotel in Nairobi on Friday, Lenaola questioned why the system procured two years ago went down at such a moment.
“Those of you who followed the Rigathi Gachagua saga will remember that at some point the judiciary's online filing system went down.
“Why did that online platform collapse? Why did the firewalls that we created before 2022 suddenly become vulnerable?” Lenaola posed.
The Supreme Court judge went on to invite Kenyans to a reflection on what could happen in 2027, a time when the country will hold its General Elections.
"Imagine what will happen in 2027? I will say no more but think about it," he said.
On October 24, the Judiciary experienced a system outage that affected three key platforms used in legal processes namely the e-filing system, the Case Tracking System (CTS), and the Cause list system.
The e-filing system allows legal practitioners to submit documents online, while the CTS tracks case progress and stores court records.
The Causelist system generates daily court schedules. With all three systems down, the Judiciary has put in place alternative methods to handle urgent matters.
The system outage made its way to Gachagua's court impeachment proceedings where three petitioners challenging his ouster alleged a plot to block their petitions from being placed before a judge in time.
The three were Miruru Waweru, Andrew Njoroge and Mutonga Kamau.
“It is our view that the systems were malfunctioning in a deliberate attempt to block our petition and application from being placed before a judge timeously until the National Assembly completed the approval of the President's deputy president nominee with intent to defeat grant of stay orders sought,” the petitioners stated.
Judiciary in their notice noted that the outage impacted the submission and processing of legal documents across the country.
Consequently, they provided alternative methods for time-sensitive filings.
"For applications under Certificate of Urgency and time-bound pleadings, forward the same through the respective court stations' email addresses and copy to [email protected] for processing," the Judiciary advised.
