Revisiting Court-Annexed Mediation: Whose dispute is it? The illusion of party autonomy and the diminished advocate's duty to the client
by admin on | 2026-07-06 22:27:21 Last Updated by admin on 2026-07-18 21:30:49
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Abstract
Kenya\'s Court-Annexed Mediation
(CAM) programme marks a decade of
institutionalised dispute resolution, having
achieved notable statistical milestones
including the settlement of disputes worth
over Ksh 52.2 billion and a consistent
settlement rate exceeding 55% across 82
registries nationwide. Yet beneath these
celebrated metrics lies a structural and
jurisprudential contradiction that this article
subjects to sustained critical scrutiny. The
Civil Procedure (Court-Annexed Mediation)
Rules, 2022, enacted as Legal Notice 145
of 2022, have progressively shifted CAM
from a consensual, party-driven forum into a
mandatory institutional mechanism, eroding
the foundational principle of party autonomy
upon which all ADR is constitutionally
premised. The article argues that the
compulsory screening, unilateral court referral,
registrar-driven mediator appointment,
and penalty-backed timelines embedded
in the 2022 Rules do not merely strain the
1
ADR model, they invert it, transforming
mediation from a choice into a compulsion
and settlement from an expression of
self-determination into an institutional
performance metric. The article further
interrogates how this structural inversion
has re-cast the advocate\'s professional
role in ways that are irreconcilable with the
orthodox duty to the client, generating a
tension between zealous representation and
mandated facilitation that the current legal
framework has failed to resolve.
1. Introduction:
A decade of achievement and a growing structural anxiety There is a particular institutional satisfaction in announcing that an initiative has worked. Since Kenya\'s Court-Annexed Mediation programme was formally launched in April 2016 pursuant to the constitutional mandate under Article 159(2)(c) of the Constitution of Kenya, 2010, the Judiciary has had much to announce.1 The 2025 State of the Judiciary read more...
