'Learned' in Latin, lost in reality: The strange case of Kenya's justice system

Title: 'Learned' in Latin, lost in reality: The strange case of Kenya's justice system Category: Opinion

Walk into the Milimani Law Courts on any given morning and you will encounter a system that dresses itself in borrowed clothing. Barristers refer to colleagues as "my learned friend." Judges don medieval-era language in rulings that could be simplified without any loss of legal precision. Court documents carry Latin phrases that even many advocates must privately look up, and proceedings unfold at a pace that punishes the poor, who cannot afford to fund adjournment after adjournment.

Kenya inherited its legal architecture from British colonial administration, and unlike several post-independence peers, it has been slow to comprehensively localise either the language or the culture of its courts. Efforts exist: the judiciary's Judiciary Transformation Framework, launched over a decade ago, promised to bring justice closer to citizens through mobile courts and plain-language communication. Progress has been real in some areas, particularly in the use of Swahili in subordinate courts and in community justice initiatives in counties like Turkana and Marsabit.

But the upper rungs of the system remain largely inaccessible in practice. A resident of Mathare or Mukuru kwa Njenga facing a civil dispute enters a High Court environment that communicates, implicitly and explicitly, that the room was not built for them. Legal aid services are chronically underfunded. The National Legal Aid Service, established under the Legal Aid Act of 2016, operates with a fraction of the resources its mandate demands.

The irony is that Kenya's constitution is written in admirably clear prose. The gap between that founding document and the daily operation of the courts it created represents unfinished work. Justice cannot be a privilege mediated by fluency in the language of a departed coloniser.