CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2009
| Author | Ndung'u, Daniel Githeng'u |
|---|---|
| Title | An Attempt to Deal with the Past: Exploring Kenya's Long Road to a Truth Commission |
| Summary | After countries emerge from periods of atrocities, usually committed by the state or groups opposing the state or in a civil war, a need to try to deal with this past arises. Generally, these periods leave powerful legacies of human rights violations including torture, massacres, enforced disappearances or other forms of serious human rights violations. They leave in their wake victims and perpetrators: victims calling for justice and perpetrators who would do anything to prevent their being held to account. In the last 30 years, this kind of attempt to deal with the past has been carried out within the discourse of transitional justice. Within the general field of transitional justice, there have been various institutions and mechanisms that states have employed in a bid to deal with the past. These have included prosecutions, reparation programmes, sanctioned truth telling and lustration in Central and Eastern Europe. In the last six years, Kenya has grappled with the issue of how to deal with this kind of past. This paper will therefore explore attempts to deal with the past, using the institution of a truth commission. The proposed truth commission for Kenya is taken as a case study. A review a number of truth commission practices in the past is conducted to provide a framework for analyzing the proposed truth commission. This analysis will cover both the Taskforce on the Establishment of a Truth Commission for Kenya and the Truth Commission Bill 2008 to establish whether its provisions conform to truth commission practices elsewhere. The paper concludes that the practice of truth commission in general is an important means of dealing with the past, and many countries in transition have looked up to it as one of the preferred institutions in that endeavor. However, this process in Kenya faces serious challenges and there is need for fundamental change in the Kenyan political scene if transitional justice in general and a truth commission in particular are to become a reality. |
| Supervisor | Dimitrijevic, Nenad Milos |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2009/ndungu_daniel.pdf |
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