The question no-one wants to answer!

On Friday 25 March, several Kenyan bloggers held a meeting in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, under the newly formed BAKE (Bloggers Association KEnya). The meeting was the 4th in an initiative by some of Kenyas veteran bloggers. Part of the background, reports Global Voices, is tension between the blogger community and the mainstream media, who bloggers feel have a lack of appreciation for blogging as a tool for the generation and delivery of news and information.

The Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) and Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE) have condemned US Representative Chris Smith’s recent trip to Kenya, where he attacked the country’s new constitution and opened a new front in the international offensive of his war on women. Smith spoke under the guise of human rights at the Kenya Christian Professionals Forum. He condemned the new Kenyan constitution’s decriminalisation of abortion in emergency situations or to protect the life or health of the pregnant woman, telling audience members that 'we need a world that is free of abortion'.

The British Government’s efforts to cover up one of the darkest episodes in colonial history have been revealed by the discovery of a vast cache of documents relating to the bloody Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. The papers, documenting efforts to put down insurgency, were spirited out of Kenya on the eve of independence and have been held in secret British government archives for half a century.

Bernadette Lyodu looks at the relationship between forced migration and transitional justice, with reference to efforts to include refugees who fled the 2007 election violence in Kenya's transitional justice processes.

With the ‘Hague Six’ attempting to drum up domestic support to deflect the ICC (International Criminal Court) indictments over their role in Kenya’s 2007–08 post-election crisis, H. Nanjala Nyabola laments the willingness of the country’s ‘silent majority’ to simply ‘brush the nasty business of the post-election violence under the rug’.

A majority of Kenyans want the six suspected sponsors of 2007/2008 post election violence to stand trial at the International Criminal Court, a new opinion poll shows. Of those polled, 61 per cent said they prefer the Ocampo Six (as the suspects are popularly known) to answer charges at The Hague-based court, the survey by research firm Synovate showed.

Media images of men in northern Kenya washing condoms for re-use have underscored the need to improve HIV communication and close gaps in the supply of condoms in rural areas. Local TV channels recently showed images of men in Isiolo, in rural northern Kenya, washing condoms and hanging them out to dry. The Ministry of Health recently said the country faced an acute, nationwide shortage of condoms; it has appealed to the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, PEPFAR, to supply 45 million condoms.

Kenya has expressed concern over the instability in Somalia as cross-border raids by insurgents increase and a steady influx of refugees cross the porous frontier. Fighting between Somali government troops and al Shabaab Islamist insurgents has forced hundreds of thousands to flee the lawless Horn of Africa nation, with Kenya hosting more than 500,000 in several camps.

Former truth team deputy chairperson Betty Murungi has called for those accused of sexual violence during the post-election chaos to be tried locally. 'We need to find local solutions to local problems,' Ms Murungi said during a press conference on gender violence in Africa. Ms Murungi joined the Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice (WIGJ) to lobby for justice for Kenyans who were sexually abused during the post-election violence four years ago.

Kenya’s Nubians are a ‘stateless people’, writes Xena Abdul, only recently part-recognised by the Kenyan government and facing day-to-day discrimination around land rights and identity.

Despite Kenyan leaders' pronouncements on only trying Kenyan suspects within the country's legal system, Al-Amin Kimathi's presence in a Kampala jail suggests otherwise, says Gado.

Kenya opened its first free 24-hour health clinic on Friday (25 March), aimed at driving down the HIV rate among some of the country's most at-risk groups - long distance truck drivers and sex workers. Organisers said the clinic, set up in a trailer park on the outskirts of Busia town on Kenya's border with Uganda, would offer 'moonlight' testing and counselling, as well as free distribution of condoms. Long days on the road means it is often difficult for truckers to visit conventional medical centres.

Professor James Gathii, Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship and the Governor George E. Pataki Professor of International Commercial Law at Albany (New York) Law School, has launched a new blog - - focusing on Kenya's efforts to defer an International Criminal Court (ICC) case against the six alleged masterminds of Kenya's 2008 post-election violence.

Kenyan MPs were heavily criticised by the US for voting to have the government compensate Mau landowners. In a cable to his bosses in Washington dated 23 September 2009, US ambassador Michael Ranneberger accused Kenyan MPs of entrenching the culture of impunity by passing an amendment seeking to compensate those evicted from the Mau water tower.

The American Embassy believed in March 2007 that President Kibaki's government planned to arrest opposition leader Raila Odinga over the controversial Artur Brothers, according to Wikileaks. 'Post (the embassy) has various pieces of evidence suggesting that the men are associated with either State House or one of the 'first families' and Kamlesh Pattni, the man behind the Goldenberg scandal,' said the cable from ambassador Michael Ranneberger dated 14 March 2007.

The US predicted the outbreak of violence in the 2007 General Election 10 months before Kenyans cast their votes. In a cable posted to Washington on February 5, 2007, ambassador Michael Ranneberger warned that the increasing tribalisation of Kenyan politics could plunge the country into chaos in the run-up to the elections.

In one of the largest and oldest refugee settlements in the world, education is a luxury denied most of the 90,739 children who live there. Set up at the outset of Somalia’s civil war in 1991 to accommodate 90,000 refugees, three camps near the northeastern Kenyan town of Dadaab - Hagadera, Ifo and Dagahaley - are now home to more than three times that number, and persistent conflict in Somalia, from where 95 per cent of the refugees originate, means the population grows daily.

The High Court in Kenya has relied upon the work of Stuart Wilson, the Socio-economic Rights Institute of South Africa's director of litigation, in granting a conservatory order preventing the eviction of thousands of informal settlers in Nairobi. In granting the order, Mr. Justice Musinga held that 'Eviction should not result in individuals being rendered homeless or vulnerable to the violation of other human rights. Where those affected are unable to provide for themselves, the State party must take all reasonable measures, to the maximum of its available resources, to ensure that adequate alternative housing, resettlement or access to productive land, as the case may be is available.' The Judge also urged the Kenyan government to adopt a comprehensive housing policy which includes measure to provide interim relief for desperately poor people facing eviction.

President Kibaki told the United States Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Fraser at the height of post election violence that he won the disputed 2007 elections squarely. Kibaki maintained he had won the December 2007 elections fairly and since the defunct Electoral Commission of Kenya had declared him winner of the presidential elections, only the courts could make him relinquish power in case they ruled otherwise. According to a diplomatic cable dated 29 January 2008 and now released by Wikileaks, Kibaki said this during two meetings he held with former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Jendayi Frazer and US ambassador to Michael Ranneberger.