National Assembly Majority Leader Aden Duale and his Senate counterpart Kithure Kindiki led over 15 MPs in stating that they were fed up with the way the cases were being conducted.
“We want to tell the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its prosecutor as well as their local political collaborators in no uncertain terms that we have had enough of this travesty. Post election violence is a traumatic reality in this country. The victims are real people with real needs, not statistics to be bandied in remote dramas,” Duale stated.
They repeated their claim that the cases were political and not judicial in nature.
Kindiki said the political genesis of the ICC cases has contaminated any prospects of justice that the court may have contemplated.
“We as the Jubilee Coalition are telling the ICC to terminate the cases that are currently ongoing involving President Uhuru Kenyatta, Deputy President William Ruto and journalist Joshua arap Sang with immediate effect.” He added, “the people of Kenya and the people of the world have been treated to a circus where goal posts have been shifted in shameless and an openly biased political melodrama.”
Duale said Tuesday’s allegations by the ICC that the government had leaked information to the public was another attempt to show that Kenya was not cooperating with the court.
He says the ‘leaked information’ was released during court open session.
“It was on the platform of this Court-sanctioned live broadcasting that the world received disclosures from The Hague of the President’s telephone records, ownership of land and movable assets. In fact, lawyers freely canvassed the information in open court to something deliberately presented in the public domain a leakage is dishonest and absurd in the extreme,” Duale said.
The three judges of the ICC Trial Chamber issued the warning Tuesday, accusing the government of breaching its code of confidentiality seven times even after it had been cautioned against the offence which could impact on the direction that Kenyatta’s case will take.
The judges said the government also went against the confidentiality rule during the status conference of October 7 and 8. Kenyatta personally attended the session.