DPP Haji Defends Dropping of High-Profile Cases During Tenure

Director of public prosecution (DPP) Noordin Haji has disavowed any responsibility for the dismissal of cases against prominent people.

Haji noted that his office withdrew over 25,000 other cases, not necessarily ones against well-known people.

He was appearing before the Departmental Committee on Defence, Intelligence, and Foreign Relations of the National Assembly during his vetting for the position of Director General of the National Intelligence Service (NIS).

The DPP emphasized that his office dropped a total of 25,716 cases between 2021 and 2022 to relieve the overcrowding in remand prisons as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, and that the withdrawal of cases should not be interpreted as a political action following the election of President William Ruto in August 2022.

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“People are trying to portray that it is only high profile cases which we have withdrawn. The statistics show that in 2017 before I was even DPP,  11,188 withdrawals were taken in 2018/2019, there were 10,600, in 2019/2020, in 2020/2021 there were 18,750 and in 2021/2022 we dropped 25,716 cases,” he elucidated.

“Some of these withdrawals, why the figures have gone up was because of the COVID period where we had gone out to decongest the remand prisons which were then full of petty offenders.”

“The issue of withdrawal is not something that should be packaged in a way that we were benefiting the high and mighty or for political reasons. I assure the committee that is not the case.”

He also denied being pressured into dropping the cases, saying that his office simply relied on the evidence presented by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) investigators and that the courts had also agreed to do so.

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“I want to remind the committee that the decision is not made by me solely; the magistrate, the judge…when we go before them, they have the final say and you can refer to the Constitution,” he stated. 

“The withdrawals we made were based on the evidence tabled to us and reviews were made openly and independently.”

When the DCI was conducting its investigation, Haji accused them of fraud and a lack of transparency while denying being forced to charge particular people.

The NIS Director General nominee asserted that because ODPP is not required to undertake investigations, it must rely solely on the DCI’s conclusions.

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“Some of the documents examined by the document examiners at the DCI office were done fraudulently by the officers through coercion by those in charge. The implication of this is that many of those cases can be challenged because those documents examined were not examined properly,” he noted.

“As the prosecutor, we do not have the expertise to look at those documents; we trust that the document examiner is a trustworthy person, honest and a person of integrity. What happened is that those documents were tampered with…signatures and titles.”