Makau W. Mutua

Mutua was born in 1958 in Kenya, the second of seven children. He received secondary education at Kitui School and Alliance High School. An excellent student throughout his life, he gained attention in other ways while attending the University of Nairobi with his vocal opposition to the national government. He was arrested in May 1981 for his dissent and was only released after fasting in a hunger strike for several days.[11] He eventually found his way to Tanzania where he applied for United Nations refugee status. He earned a Masters in Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, ultimately attending Harvard Law School in 1984. There he earned an LLM in 1985 and an SJD in 1987.[12]

After graduation from Harvard, he worked for White & Case, a New York City law firm, but later pursued his dreams of human rights advocacy with his work at Human Rights First, then known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. In 1991, he returned to Harvard where he became the Associate Director of the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program. In 1996, he joined the University at Buffalo Law School faculty. In December 2007, he was appointed Interim Dean at the University at Buffalo Law School and was named the permanent Dean in May 2008. Mutua has served as Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, the University of Iowa College of Law, the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain, the University of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, the United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica, the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and the University of Puerto Rico School of Law, among others.[13][14] He was elected Vice President of the American Society of International Law from 2011-2013 after serving as its Executive Council from 2007–2010.[15] He was the co-chair of the 2000 Annual meeting of the ASIL.[16] He sits on the boards of scholarly journals and NGOs.

He was a founder and serves as Chairman of the Nairobi-based Kenya Human Rights Commission.[17] In 2007, he gave the Abiola Lecture, the signature keynote address at the annual meeting of the African Studies Association, the leading Africana Studies academic association in the world.[18][19] In April 2015, Mutua received the Distinguished Africanist award from the NYASA (New York African Studies Association), the association's highest honor.[20] He has authored several books and dozens of scholarly articles in law journals and other publications.[21] His latest book, Human Rights Standards: Hegemony, Law, and Politics was published by SUNY Press in February 2016.[22] James Thuo Gathii considers him part of the movement known as TWAIL, or Third World Approaches to International Law.[23][24] In January 2017, Mutua was appointed to a four-year-term as Editor of the Routledge Series on Law in Africa.[25]

On September 24, 2014, Mutua announced that he was stepping down from the SUNY Buffalo Dean's Office amid allegations of perjury in state and federal courts and civil rights violations against law school faculty members, including violations of federal due process rights and sexual discrimination laws. According to the Buffalo News, a delegation of female professors met with the University's Provost in the early months of 2014 to accuse Mutua of anti-feminism and using a "divide and conquer" strategy to instill fear and mistrust in the faculty, but that the administration refused to do anything to help them.[26]

The University's student-run newspaper, The Spectrum, issued the initial account of Mutua's removal from the Dean's Office, reporting that "[t]he resignation comes amid allegations that he lied in federal court and in a state administrative proceeding." The Spectrum further reported that "the law school faculty in October of 2010 [had] attempted to hold a vote of no confidence in Mutua, but the attempt was dismissed by then President John B. Simpson and then Provost Satish Tripathi." The Spectrum concluded that "[f]aculty and students interviewed by The Spectrum offered tepid to scathing critiques of Mutua’s tenure and many students insist they have never seen Mutua on campus nor interacted with him." [27]

These accounts of turmoil in the law school were confirmed by a front-page story in the Buffalo News on September 27, 2014. "Inside one of Buffalo’s oldest legal institutions, there is a growing rift, an internal feud fueled by allegations of perjury against its leader, a near vote of no confidence and an internal review painting a portrait of a deeply divided faculty." "The dean’s critics," according to the Buffalo News, "are numerous, and include some of the school’s most highly regarded faculty members." In their interviews for the Buffalo News they alleged that "Mutua lacks an educational vision and is more concerned with power and control than with the school’s future." [28]

In its own follow-up on the scandal, The Spectrum criticized President Tripathi's long delay in removing Mutua from office: "Despite a hasty appointment, dissatisfied faculty and near invisibility on campus, it wasn’t until Makau Mutua faced allegations of lying under oath that his position as dean of UB’s law school grew tenuous....And yet, after all this – after a shaky appointment, long absences from campus, discontent from professors and legal turmoil – six years went by before even the possibility of accountability arose."[29]

In November 2017, after almost a decade of legal battles in state and federal courts, including an anti-union animus charge brought against him by the New York State United Teachers (as reported in the Buffalo News story), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that clinical professors in the SUNY system, under the Policies of the SUNY Trustees, have no due process rights in federal court. That ruling finally ended the civil rights litigation. In response to what he called his "vindication," Mutua claimed that he had been the victim of a conspiracy by "a cabal of racist law professors who could not accept the leadership of a talented and forward-thinking black man." [30]

Following his removal from the Dean's Office, the President of the University granted Mutua a three-semester sabbatical at his full pay. From September 2015 to September 2016, he was a human rights adviser at the World Bank to develop the human rights policy for the international financial and development institution. The consultancy was criticized by the campus newspaper, which reported that "the university is still paying the former law school dean his full salary – a salary that nears $300,000 - despite being away from the school and taking on outside work."[31]

In 2003, while on sabbatical in Kenya, he was appointed by the government of President Mwai Kibaki as Chair of the Task Force on the Establishment of a Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission, which recommended a truth commission for Kenya. He was also a Delegate in 2003 to the Kenya National Constitutional Conference, which produced a contested draft constitution for Kenya.[32] In 2006, he was legal counsel to John Githongo, the former Kenyan anti-corruption czar who exposed the Anglo-Leasing scandal in the Kibaki government.[33]

In a seven-year period, Mutua became a columnist for the Sunday Nation, one of the two the main newspapers in East and Central Africa. In September 2013, he departed the Sunday Nation and joined the Standard on Sunday, the Sunday Nation's chief competitor.[34]

Following the early retirement of Dr. Willy Mutunga from the Office of Chief Justice & President of the Supreme Court of Kenya in June 2016, Mutua was among the 10 people who applied for the job in response to the vacancy announcement by the Judicial Service Commission.[35]

When the Commission drew the short list of applicants who were to be interviewed for the job, Mutua's name was conspicuously and surprisingly missing from the list, despite his strong credentials.[36] A civil society organization filed a case at the Constitutional Court questioning the criteria used in the shortlisting, and demanding that applicants who met the constitutional requirements be interviewed.

It emerged in the litigation that Mutua had not been shortlisted since he had not obtained a tax clearance from the Kenya Revenue Authority since he had reportedly not met his tax obligations in Kenya. The Constitutional Court held that persons who meet the constitutional threshold for the office must be interviewed and given the chance to explain why they did not get clearances.[37]

Following this case, Mutua and four other applicants who had been left out of the shortlist were invited to interview for the job.

During the interview, the Judicial Service Commission put him to task over tweets he had made following the contested election of Uhuru Kenyatta as President of Kenya in March 2013.[38] In a tweet published shortly after the 2013 general election, Mutua indicated that he would not recognize Uhuru Kenyatta as president due to the circumstances under which he was declared the winner of the poll. Mutua stuck to his position, and referred to President Kenyatta as Mr. Kenyatta throughout the interview.

When the interviews ended, the commission announced that it had settled on Kenyan Court of Appeal Judge David Maraga as the nominee for the Office of Chief Justice. Mutua was ranked third in the interviews.[39][40] On 3 December 2017, after the Supreme Court confirmed Kenyatta's reelection, Mutua reiterated his refusal to recognize his presidency.[41]

In 1994, Mutua offered up an idea for how to reorganize Africa to construct 15 sustainable states from the 55 semi-viable states that existed at the time. He theorized this new ideal for the organization of Africa as a result of what he believed were the "consequences of the failed postcolonial state are so destructive that radical solutions must now be contemplated to avert the wholesale destruction of groups of the African people".[42] Mutua decided that the way in which the new states would be created would be by looking at ethnic similarities, cultural homogeneity, and economic viability. The new states that Mutua theorized included the Republic of Kusini, a new Egypt, Nubia, a new Mali, a new Somalia, a new Congo, a new Ghana, a new Benin, a new Libya, a Sahara state, Kisiwani, a new state made up of a collection of islands, and the current states of Angola and Algeria would remain the same.