Kenya’s maximum senior pass judgement on has clash out following contemporary allegations of corruption and incompetence throughout the judiciary.

“In all these 22 years I’ve been a judge and a chief justice, nobody has ever approached me with a bribe. I would have them arrested,” Martha Koome informed the BBC.

The rustic’s first feminine important justice has not too long ago been accused of failing to correctly examine and take on allegations of bribery and corruption throughout the judiciary.

Some Kenyans had been relating to “jurispesa” – a corruption of the felony time period jurisprudence and pesa (the Swahili guarantee for cash) – implying there’s corruption within the judiciary.

However she defended herself and her colleagues, asking someone making such accusations to offer the proof to the protection businesses or to the judicial oversight fee.

She informed the BBC Africa Day-to-day podcast that the claims had been “supposed to lower my credibility. It is supposed to distract me. I know who I am and I know what I have done and what I am going to do.”

She stated she would at all times stay unbiased.

Kenya’s judiciary has lengthy been marred via claims of corruption and in 2021 Justice Koome informed the BBC that corruption used to be “a national embarrassment in and out of the judiciary.

She said that some of the criticism she faced was because of her gender. “It’s overall misogyny. It’s overall chauvinism.”

She also said that one of the things she was most passionate about was addressing violence against women.

She said it was “utterly disheartening” that “each alternative past there’s a record of a tender girl who has misplaced her occasion thru violence”.

Justice Koome said there were many matters of rape that were not moving at all or were waiting in court for lack of witnesses.

There has been a recent increase in the levels of violence against women, with police announcing that nearly 100 women and girls had been killed in the past three months.

More than 500 women were victims of femicide in Kenya between 2016 and 2024, according to the Africa Data Hub.

Justice Koome expressed her commitment to addressing the issue by making justice available to women across the country.

She has said she aims to open 11 courts around the country specialising in sexual and gender-based crimes – with two of them already set up in the western Kisumu and Siaya counties.

“We have now a quantity of hope in them as a result of instances of gender-based violence will have to be given precedence. In order that the sufferer who used to be violated does now not book coming to court docket, occasion in occasion out,” she stated.