Go to jail – but for how long?

Woe betide Kenyan government officials who disobey the court and ignore orders to pay the bills of the legal firms that have done work for them. In this case, the bill was due from 1 January 2014 and had been approved by the court in 2014, yet orders to pay had simply been ignored by the three local government officials in charge of county’s finances. The law firm asked the court to issue warrants for the arrest of the officials and to order that the police ensure they are committed to civil jail. As Carmel Rickard points out in her latest A Matter of Justice column on the Legalbrief site, while the judge has found in favour of the law firm’s application, there appears to be a problem with the order: the court has ruled that the officials must be arrested and jailed – but there is no indication of how long they should stay in prison.