Kenya’s continued use of the death penalty creates significant risk that it will fail to uphold its obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as Kenya’s use of the death penalty implicates various cultural, social, and economic rights. This report supplements and updates information that the coauthors provided to the Committee at the List of Issues Prior to Reporting stage.

Kenya has not carried out any executions since the late 1980s. Furthermore, in October 2016, the Kenyan President commuted all sentences of death in the country to life sentences, and in July 2023, President Ruto commuted the sentences of all people who had been sentenced to death before November 2022. Kenyan courts, however, continue to hand down death sentences.

This report recommends that the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recommend that Kenya formally abolish the death penalty and commute the sentences of all persons on death row. Kenya should also take active steps to address the intersecting issues of access to justice, discrimination, domestic violence, poverty, and access to healthcare, particularly as they are relevant in capital cases. First, Kenya should take additional steps to ensure that all people charged with capital crimes have access to well-qualified legal counsel with adequate funding for a thorough pre-trial investigation and should increase transparency within the criminal legal system in order to engender trust by the Kenyan people in that system, particularly for people from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. Second, Kenya should ensure that judicial actors have adequate training regarding gender-specific defenses and gender-specific mitigation in capital trials to account for the context of gender-based violence that may lead victims of such violence to commit death-eligible offenses. Third, Kenya should ensure that poverty does not adversely affect the fair trial rights of people charged with capital crimes. Last, Kenya should ensure that people in detention, particularly people under sentence of death, have adequate access to medical and health care.