The plan is to send some 1,000 Kenyan police officers to Haiti in an effort to stop the rampant gang violence there. Kenya offered to serve as the head of a multinational security team in the unstable Caribbean country last year. However, the proposal was halted in January by the High Court, which decided that the government lacked the right to send police abroad without a contract. The National Security Council was also found to be without legal jurisdiction to dispatch police outside of Kenya. To save the proposal, Haiti’s prime minister traveled to the East African nation on Thursday.
As gang violence in Haiti reached “a critical point” in January, according to a UN envoy, around 5,000 killings were recorded in 2022—more than twice as many as in 2022. More than 1,100 people were slain, injured, or abducted in that one month alone. Kenyan President William Ruto announced in a statement on Friday that he and Prime Minister Ariel Henry of Haiti had signed a deal and talked about what needed to be done next to expedite the deployment. In addition to the Kenyan police, 150 troops from the Bahamas have committed. Antigua and Barbuda and Jamaica have shown their willingness to assist, while the United States has committed £158 million ($200 million) to fund the deployment.
Benin made the offer of 2,000 troops earlier this week. Many Kenyans, on the other hand, disagree with the deployment, claiming that domestic security issues should be resolved first. Ekuru Aukot, the opposition politician who first submitted the petition against the deployment, announced on Friday that he will file a case “for contempt of court” to the AFP news agency. “We will question the validity of this secretive agreement,” he stated.
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