Kenya's missed chance to try election rioters

Kenya has blown its best chance to prosecute those behind post-election violence, a British legal expert has said.

Currently, only the International Criminal Court at The Hague is investigating clashes following the 2007 disputed presidential poll, which left 1,300 people dead.

Charges are expected as early as December, but it is understood fewer than six of the most senior figures will be indicted.

The middlemen and machete-wielding foot-soldiers who carried out the killings are likely to avoid any prosecutions.

Plans for proceedings within Kenya's notoriously corrupt courts were dismissed early on. "I don't think all the possible options were properly debated here in Kenya," Courtenay Griffiths QC, the British barrister defending Charles Taylor, Liberia's former president, told The Scotsman on a visit to Kenya.

"It appears to have been a straight choice between Kenyan courts or the ICC. There seems to have been very little debate about the model of a hybrid court in (Kenya], under the UN."

Such a court was set up in Sierra Leone after a civil war in 2002. Eight of 11 people indicted were convicted and jailed for 15-52 years. Mr Taylor is still on trial, and two accused have died.