What the Gachagua Impeachment Judgment Means for the Justice System

On 17th October 2024, H.E. Rigathi Gachagua became the first Deputy President in Kenya's constitutional history to be removed from office by impeachment. The country watched. Kenya's courts have now spoken, and what they said has ignited a debate that will not be settled in a single judgment.

This was always going to be one of those cases. Not because of who the petitioner was, or because of the politics that charged every moment of the Senate trial, but because of the constitutional questions it forced into the open. Eighteen consolidated petitions. Nearly two years of litigation. And on 8th June 2026, a three-judge bench of the High Court delivered a verdict that will be argued over in lecture halls, chambers, and courtrooms for years. It upheld the impeachment. It also found that the process that produced it violated the Constitution. Both things are true at the same time, and that is precisely why this judgment matters.

What the court found

The court's finding on fair administrative action is the most significant and the most uncomfortable aspect of what was decided. H.E. Gachagua's rights under Articles 47 and 50, the right to fair administrative action, and the right to a fair hearing, were infringed when the Senate refused to grant an adjournment in his absence and proceeded to conduct a trial without him. The court does not hedge on this. The violation is found, named, and placed on the constitutional record. The remedy, however, is not reinstatement. It is not the quashing of the Senate's resolution. It is constitutional damages of KShs. 50 million, payable by the Senate, awarded to vindicate the Constitution, restore dignity, and deter future violations.

Constitutional finality

For many Kenyans who followed every development of this saga, the late-night Senate sessions, the live broadcasts, the constitutional arguments traded across every platform, that answer raises a harder question: if a process can violate the Constitution and still stand, what is the Constitution actually protecting? Article 2(4) provides that any act inconsistent with the Constitution is void to the extent of the inconsistency. The court's answer to that provision is a doctrine it introduces as constitutional finality, the principle that once the Senate votes under Article 145(7), the outcome is self-executing, and places itself beyond reversal, regardless of how it arrived there. That doctrine is new. It is clearly stated. And it changes the legal landscape in ways that go well beyond this case.

The court itself appears to know this. In one of the more striking passages in the judgment, it acknowledges that the tension between constitutional finality and the vindication of rights is live and unresolved, and suggests that a constitutional amendment clarifying the scope of judicial review in impeachment proceedings may be warranted. A court that has just delivered judgment on one of Kenya's most-watched constitutional cases, saying in that same judgment that the Constitution may need to be amended to resolve a question it has raised, that is worth pausing on.

Public participation

The public participation question runs alongside this and has generated its own debate among practitioners. The court held that the National Assembly's participation exercise was sufficient for both stages of the impeachment process, that the Senate, sitting as a trial body, had no independent obligation to hear from the public separately. Kenya's constitutional architecture, built on the national values in Article 10 and the parliamentary participation obligations in Article 118, does not easily support the idea that one house's public participation discharges the other's. The Senate in an impeachment is not finishing the National Assembly's work. It is performing a constitutionally distinct function, a trial. If that distinction does not carry an independent participation obligation, the precedent extends well beyond the removal of the Deputy President into every bicameral process where the two houses perform separate constitutional functions in sequence.

What comes next

As for what comes next: H.E. Gachagua has publicly stated that he intends to appeal the decision. The legal terrain of that appeal is one of the most genuinely fascinating constitutional questions now open in Kenyan jurisprudence.

If the High Court is correct that Article 145(7) confers constitutional finality on the Senate's resolution, finality that no court can reverse, then what exactly is an appellate court being asked to do? Can the constitutional finality doctrine itself be reviewed on appeal? Can a finding that the process was constitutionally infirm be escalated to a court with wider jurisdiction, and if so, what remedy remains available? These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions the Court of Appeal will need to confront if the appeal proceeds.

Kenya's constitutional project has always been tested most sharply at exactly these points, where political reality and constitutional principle come into tension and a court must decide how to hold both. This judgment does not resolve that tension. It names it, applies it, and delivers a result. What comes next, in the Court of Appeal, in Parliament's long-overdue work to legislate the Deputy Presidential removal framework under Article 150, and in the broader public reckoning with what the Constitution means when it is most needed, is the story that is still being written.

Find our detailed review below. Our full analysis works through the constitutional finality doctrine, the Article 2(4) tension, the Senate's independent public participation obligation, and the adequacy of KShs. 50 million as vindicatory relief and what this judgment means for advocates advising officeholders facing removal.