Chapter 1 Formative Years
Channel: Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC)
Date: 2014-07-17

Kenya started off as a liberal democratic state on attaining independence in 1963.However,efforts to entrench this tradition were crashed in the mid 1960s through emasculation of multi-party politics. Kenya thus operated as a de facto one-party state with the Kenya African National Union (KANU) as the only political party

In 1992, it was made a de jure one party state until democratic forces reversed the situation in 1992.During this time, parliament was a rubber stamp of the executive, sycophancy was institutionalized, the judiciary was at the executive, radical intellectual were incarcerated and exiled and the language of liberation was anathema.

It is against this background that in 1991 five Kenyans living in exile in the United States of America and Canada formed KHRC and chose the human rights language because it was easy for the middle class and donors to accept.