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Ogiek People's Development Programme CEO Daniel Kobei during an event to mark eight years since the ruling of African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, in Marioshoni, Molo sub-county, on May 26, 2025. [File, Standard]
When the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights ruled in favour of the Ogiek in 2017, it was hailed as a landmark victory for Indigenous rights across Africa.
The court recognised the Ogiek as the ancestral owners of Kenya’s Mau Forest, East Africa’s largest montane forest ecosystem and one of the country’s most important water towers.
It found that decades of forced evictions had violated multiple provisions of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and affirmed that conservation could not be used as a justification to dispossess indigenous communities from their ancestral lands.
