Advocates across Kenya stayed away from courtrooms today in a coordinated nationwide walkout, the most aggressive collective action the Bar has taken against the Bench in years.
It was billed, in the careful language of the Law Society of Kenya, as a protest over case backlogs and registry inefficiencies.
It was not, in substance, about paperwork.
It was about a judiciary that appears to have built itself a legal shield against its own watchdogs, and it landed on the same day the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission dragged yet another judicial officer out of a restaurant with marked money allegedly still in his pocket.
Hours before advocates downed their files, EACC detectives moved on Senior Principal Magistrate Martin Kinyua Mutegi of Kangema Law Courts and Principal Probation Officer Julius Irungu Njogu, arresting the pair on the evening of July 21 at a restaurant in Kangema Township, Murang’a County.
The Commission says the two had demanded Sh170,000 from a Murang’a businessman convicted on July 2 of obtaining money by false pretences and scheduled for sentencing this very morning, July 22, promising that the payment would buy him a probation report recommending a non-custodial term instead of prison.
Investigators say they recovered Sh150,000 in marked currency when the handover happened.
Chief Justice Martha Koome, who chairs the Judicial Service Commission, suspended Mutegi within hours and opened disciplinary proceedings, calling the allegations, if proved, a grave breach of the Judicial Code of Conduct.
A protest note with twelve names and one Chief Justice
What has gone largely unremarked in the coverage of today’s walkout is the document LSK President Charles Kanjama signed two days earlier, on July 20. It is not a general complaint. It is a list: twelve judges and one magistrate, named individually, whom advocates are now instructed to boycott indefinitely, starting the day after the general strike, until the restraining orders each of them holds are lifted.
The stated ground for the targeted boycott is specific and damning; each of the named officers has personally obtained a court order halting the Judicial Service Commission, the EACC, or the Directorate of Criminal Investigations from proceeding against them.
Section A of that list is where the story stops being about court delays and starts being a constitutional emergency. It includes all six sitting judges of the Supreme Court of Kenya: Chief Justice Martha Koome, Deputy Chief Justice Philomena Mwilu, and Justices Isaac Lenaola, Smokin Wanjala, Njoki Ndung’u and Mohammed Ibrahim.
LSK’s own boycott notice states, and the Society extended its walkout to the apex court on this basis, that every sitting Supreme Court judge bar one currently remains in office by virtue of orders restraining the JSC from acting on complaints filed against them.
Every judge on Kenya’s highest court, save one, is shielded from the body meant to discipline them.
That is not a hypothetical. It is the operating status of the court that will very likely be asked, within the next eighteen months, to adjudicate disputes arising from the 2027 general election.
The Cohen case, the Tuju loan, and a pattern with a paper trail
The individual case histories behind the Section A list read like a syllabus in how Kenyan judicial officers use the courts to stop the courts. Justice William Ouko’s colleague on the list, Justice Kantai, obtained orders in 2021 halting JSC proceedings tied to a misconduct complaint arising from the murder of Dutch businessman Tob Cohen; those orders held for more than four years until the High Court finally quashed the underlying JSC summons in December 2025, ruling them unconstitutional. Justice Grace Mong’are’s name appears for a newer reason: orders secured in March 2026 barring the EACC from summoning or investigating her over corruption allegations connected to a commercial dispute involving the assets of former Cabinet minister Raphael Tuju and a Sh1.9 billion bank loan a name and a property saga this newsroom has tracked closely over the past year, and one that keeps resurfacing wherever Kenya’s judicial and banking elite intersect.
Atambo, sixteen months on
And then there is the magistrate whose name reopened this whole conversation before the ink on today’s boycott notice was even dry: Thika Chief Magistrate Stellah Atambo, listed in Section A alongside the Supreme Court bench for the same reason as the rest a live High Court order, obtained in 2025, barring the EACC, the DCI and the Director of Public Prosecutions from investigating, arresting, charging or prosecuting her.
The underlying facts have not changed since EACC officers raided her Syokimau home in March 2025 and recovered Sh2,070,000 in cash stuffed inside a laptop bag, acting on complaints that she and a court clerk were soliciting bribes from accused persons in exchange for favourable outcomes.
Atambo has maintained the money belonged to her husband.
Her lawyers challenged the search warrant on the grounds that EACC used only her initials rather than her full name; the magistrate who issued that warrant recused himself on learning the target was a personal friend of nearly two decades; and Milimani High Court Judge Chacha Mwita’s conservatory orders have now held for sixteen months while her petition inches through the Constitutional and Human Rights Division.
She continues to preside over cases at Thika Law Courts. The Kenya Magistrates and Judges Association joined those proceedings as an interested party, arguing the manner of EACC’s investigation itself raised concerns about judicial independence.
Put simply: the same legal manoeuvre approach the High Court, secure a conservatory order, freeze the anti-graft process before it can even take a statement that Atambo’s team used in 2025 is now the exact mechanism the Law Society says six Supreme Court judges and eleven other judicial officers have each used for themselves.
What looked sixteen months ago like one magistrate’s unusually well-lawyered defence now reads as a bench-wide playbook.
The institution pushes back and, LSK says, retaliates
The Judiciary’s official response has been that business continues as normal. Judiciary spokesperson Mr Ndemo insisted all courts nationwide remained open and would continue hearing and determining matters as scheduled today.
The Kenya Magistrates and Judges Association has appealed to advocates to reconsider, warning that it is litigants, not judges, who absorb the cost of a withdrawal of legal services, and urging LSK to route its complaints through the JSC and the Judiciary Ombudsman rather than publish names before investigations conclude.
LSK, for its part, says some judicial officers responded to notice of the boycott by proceeding anyway and penalising the advocates who complied with it. Kanjama told reporters the Society was documenting reports of cases struck out with prejudice and adjournment fees imposed on lawyers who declined to appear, and warned that the Society would escalate the indefinite targeted boycott and pursue further action against any judicial officer found to have undermined advocates exercising what it calls their constitutional rights.
The question Kenya cannot keep deferring
Two years ago, the sight of an EACC raid recovering millions in cash from a sitting magistrate’s laptop bag was shocking enough on its own. Today, that same magistrate sits on an official list alongside the entire Supreme Court bench, all identified by the same institutional defence mechanism: obtain an order, freeze the watchdog, wait out the calendar.
A junior magistrate in rural Murang’a is caught allegedly pocketing Sh170,000 to fix a probation report, and is suspended within hours. A Chief Magistrate and six apex-court judges hold orders that have suspended entire investigations for years, and continue to sit.
The disparity in consequence is, on its own, the story and it is the story the Law Society’s protest list, whether by design or by accident, has now put in writing.
As Kenya edges toward a general election whose disputes will almost certainly be decided by the same Supreme Court now named in Section A, the country is being asked, again, whether a judiciary that cannot discipline itself can be trusted to judge anyone else.
The boycott will end. The bribe case in Kangema will proceed to plea, or it won’t.
The conservatory orders shielding a Chief Justice, five of her fellow justices, and the magistrate whose laptop bag started this entire conversation will still be sitting on a court file somewhere in Milimani, waiting for a hearing date that keeps slipping further into the calendar than the public’s patience can reasonably be expected to stretch.
Kenya Insights will continue to track the Atambo petition, the Section A boycott list, and the Kangema bribery case as they proceed through the courts.
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