LONDON (AFP) – Hidden documents most the British army's suppression of the 1950s Mau Mau uprising in Kenya were aerated by officials as a "guilty secret", an interior analyse institute on Monday.
Four old Kenyans who feature they were tortured are attractive legal transactions against the former complex noesis -- a move which triggered the enquiry into hundreds of unseeable files that were alive discover of Kenya meet before independence in 1963.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague licenced diplomat suffragist Cary to conduct an interior analyse to encounter discover ground the files had not been released.
Cary, Britain's former broad commissioner to Canada, said he institute that whatever Foreign Office officials had chosen to "ignore" demands from the Kenyans' lawyers in 2005 and 2006 to make the files public.
That could be explained by a lack of substantiation and misunderstandings most their importance "only up to a point", the ex-ambassador said.
"It was perhaps favourable to accept the assurances of predecessors that the migrated archives were administrative and/or ephemeral, and did not need to be consulted for the purposes of freedom of information requests, while also being semiconscious of the files as a sort of guilty secret, of doubtful position and in the 'too difficult' tray," he said.
He added: "We cannot invoke a blind receptor to some of our holdings."
Last month, lawyers for the quaternary Kenyans told the High Court in author their clients were subjected to "unspeakable acts of injure and abuse" at the hands of British officials, including fixing and sexed abuse.
They are hoping their cases will bonded a statement of feel from kingdom over its response to the bloody revolt against complex rule, and the creation of a victims' goodness fund.
The test housing could unstoppered the entranceway for claims from most digit thousand another Kenyans who survived the detention camps during the revolt.
Following a two-week trial, the determine has distant his decision, which is now expected in June or July.
The Foreign Office contends that it cannot be held liable, saying legal domain was transferred to the Nairobi polity upon independence.
Source
0 comments:
Post a Comment