Our outrage is selective yet the State executes Kenyans almost every day

The single most important issue of the week was the extra-judicial killing of lawyer Willie Kimani, his client, Josphat Mwenda, and taxi driver Joseph Muiruri. The callous murders may have been driven by concerns around Mr Kimani’s human rights work.

Apparently, Willie Kimani was no ordinary lawyer, but a “hardened fighter against police brutality and extra-judicial executions”. Reports in the Nation suggest that he may have rubbed senior police the wrong way in the manner he pursued “the high-profile corruption and extrajudicial cases against police officers”.

Lawyers like Mr Kimani are rare in modern Kenya; the work they pursue is dangerous and the organisations they affiliate with are marked in Kenya. Though these organisations, like Independent Medico-Legal Unit or even Kenya Human Rights Commission, are interested in a system of justice that respects the rights of all irrespective of class, ethnicity, gender or age, the human rights standards they defend are treated by many Kenyans as unAfrican. As a result, we have accepted that police and city county askaris can arrest at will by manhandling people and without reason.

The police are emboldened in doing this because our concern about extra-judicial killings is episodic and tentative. We have a short memory of the callousness that attends to such mistreatment and murders. Only a few weeks ago, it was businessman Jacob Juma. I belong to a listserve and also follow some activists on Facebook, where police brutality and murder are reported almost every day. Such instances of callousness rarely command the kind of outrage we saw this week. In other words, we have exceptions to who can be murdered with impunity.

Prof Makau Mutua is one of the leading thinkers on human rights. His paper, "Savages, Victims and Saviours: The Metaphors of Human Rights", published in the Harvard International Law Journal in 2001 was a fitting critique of the human rights enterprise. He explored these questions further in the Mashiod Abiola Lecture at the African Studies Association in a paper, "Human Rights in Africa: The Limited Promise of Liberalism", published in the African Studies Review in 2008. His 2016 book, Human Rights Standards: Hegemony, Law, and Politics, decries the dearth of standard-setting in contemporary practice of human rights.

Prof Mutua has demonstrated the complexity of the idea and history of human rights without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Human rights remain critical in spite of the history of the movement and they depend almost entirely on canons that we, as Kenyans, consistently refuse to embrace.

Human rights are all encompassing; they are human rights not because they are conferred by the State but because they are integral to the fact of one’s humanity. The moment we take away, the rights of anyone under whatever excuse, we also open space for abuse of the basic standards.

Yet we live in a world where we are happy to take away the rights of some on flimsy reasons. In some instances, we justify such abuse because those targeted are not of our ethnicity or political affiliation, or because they look like terrorists. We generalise about whole communities because we derive false security in labelling and vilifying as we did with “Operation Usalama Watch”.

Worse, we often deploy meaningless religious or partisan political positions to justify labelling. At a just-concluded conference at St Paul’s University, Limuru, organised by Dr Joseph Wandera, of the Centre for Christian-Muslim Relations in Eastleigh, and attended by Kamkunji MP Yusuf Hassan, a general consensus developed around focusing on our common humanity.

The work of the centre, and, indeed, the community confirms that if we embrace our common humanity, no exception in the enjoyment of rights are permissible; that only a competent judicial process can take away life or punish offenders for breaking the law. We must embrace this to avoid extra-judicial killings.

Godwin R. Murunga is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Nairobi.