Faith Kasina to speak on Peace Brigades International webinar about police violence, October 30

Faith Kasina is the co-convener of the Social Justice Centres Working Group (Uhai Wetu), the co-founder and coordinator of the Kayole Community Justice Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, and is a field assistant with the Peace Brigades International-Kenya Project.

She will be speaking on the Peace Brigades International-organized webinar: Police violence has no borders: Human rights, land defence and police impunity on Friday October 30 at 10 am EDT (Ottawa), 5 pm EAT (Nairobi).

Earlier this month, The New Humanitarian reported: “Faith Kasina, 25, from Kayole, a rough neighbourhood plagued by gangs and drugs, was sexually assaulted by a policeman at last year’s Saba Saba demonstrations.”

Faith says: “[The police] came out to beat us and then I was like, ‘You can’t. You can’t touch me’. That’s when he touched my breast and told me, ‘You know what? We can do to you anything we want; we can do anything we want.’ And then he started abusing me, calling me names, and then now they took me in.”

The Saba Saba (7-7) protests are held annually on July 7 to commemorate Kenya’s pro-democracy movement that emerged in the 1990s.

Faith recently tweeted: “The Kenya police service is the most bribery prone institution. 75% of Kenyans believe that most police officers are corrupt and one in two who have interacted with the police report bribing them.”

She adds: “The police force engages in corruption but are rarely prosecuted.”

The New Humanitarian article notes: “Violence is emblematic of Kenyan policing. There has been a steady rise in killings and disappearances linked to the police over the past decade, with 2019 the most deadly year so far, with 144 alleged cases, according to Missing Voices, a nonprofit group of civil society organisations tracking police violence.”

And it highlights: “Excessive force and extrajudicial killings are routinely used to maintain law and order, especially in the poorest neighbourhoods, human rights groups told The New Humanitarian. At least eight people were killed over just two months at the beginning of the year in Kenya’s informal settlements.”

The Peace Brigades International-Kenya Project was established in December 2012. PBI-Kenya works with the Social Justice Centres Working Group. It is also part of the Missing Voices network and the Police Reforms Working Group network.

To register for the PBI webinar – that will also feature defenders from Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia and Canada sharing their experiences and analysis and shaping a global context to the problem of police violence – please click here.