President William Ruto on Sunday, May 10 got a rare opportunity to introduce Lady Justice Njoki Ndung’u, Kenya’s candidate for a seat at the International Criminal Court (ICC), to French President Emmanuel Macron.
Shortly after Macron arrived in the country and received by his host at State House, Nairobi, ahead of the Africa Forward Summit, President Ruto introduced Justice Njoki to Macron, in a bid to seek support from the leader of the first-world country.
The day had also seen President Ruto introduced Justice Njoki to three other Heads of State; Côte d’Ivoire’s Alassane Ouattara, Liberia’s Joseph Boakai and Sierra Leone’s Julius Maada Bio.
The message being delivered in each of those rooms was the same: Kenya’s candidate is not just qualified. She is exceptional.
Justice Njoki’s exceptional career
And the record backs that up. Justice Njoki Ndung’u was among the founding judges of Kenya’s Supreme Court in 2011, spending over a decade shaping the nation’s highest constitutional and criminal jurisprudence.
She is the principal architect of Kenya’s Sexual Offences Act, a law that fundamentally transformed protections for survivors of gender-based violence.
She helped build the Maputo Protocol, the African Union’s landmark treaty on women’s rights, now enshrined across 54 nations.
A judge who has spent her entire career delivering justice for the most vulnerable is now asking to do that work on the world’s biggest stage.
France and Sierra Leone are among the 125 Rome Statute state parties with their own sitting ICC judges. The engagements are ongoing.
The Africa Forward Summit, a joint gathering co-hosted by Kenya and France, has brought an extraordinary concentration of decision-makers to Nairobi, and Kenya is treating every hour of it as campaign time.
