The Mau Ogiek have suffered decades of forced evictions from their ancestral land by the Kenyan Government, without consultation or compensation. The Government has allocated land to third parties, including political allies, and permitted substantial commercial logging and other operations to take place, without sharing any of the benefits with the Ogiek. As a result, the Ogiek have lost over half their land. These evictions have been justified by the Kenyan Government over the last twenty years on the basis of environmental protection, as the Mau Forest is the largest water drainage basin in Kenya, and the country’s largest ‘water tower’.

In the 1990s, the unrecognised Mau Ogiek began to seek legal redress in the Kenyan courts, with very limited results, leading to the lodging of a complaint before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHRR) in 2009. The failure of the Government of Kenya to halt the evictions from their remnant territory resulted in the ACHPR’s referral of the case to the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHPR) in 2012, on behalf of the Mau Ogiek. The ACtHPR has since issued two rulings: first, on the rights of the Mau Ogiek (May 2017 Merits Judgment), and second, on the remedies to be applied (June 2022 Reparations Judgment on Reparations).