The High Court on Thursday dismissed all the cases lodged before it challenging President William Ruto’s order to lift the ban on Genetically Modified Crops and Foods in Kenya.
Justice Lawrence Mugambi, during a sitting at Milimani Law Courts in Nairobi, threw out the petitions that had been filed challenging the lifting of the ban on genetically modified food whose lifting had been a controversial development.
Mugambi ruled that the issue had been fairly dealt with at the Environment and Land Court in Nairobi in 2023 as part of a suit filed by the Law Society of Kenya (LSK).
In the ruling by the Environment Court, Justice Oscar Angote ruled that LSK could not prove in its petition that the GMOs would be a health risk.
He ruled that no Kenyan would be predisposed to any health-associated risks from the cultivation and consumption of GMOs, thereby dismissing LSK’s case.
“With all these institutions, save for NEMA which has not issued an Environmental Impact Assessment Licence, we should be confident that our health and environment are in good hands, it cannot be true that they have all conspired to expose the rest of the population to the calamities alluded to in the petition, at least not from the evidence on record,” Angote ruled.
President Ruto, in early October 2022, signed an executive order lifting a ten-year ban that had been slapped on the growth and cultivation of Genetically Modified Crops and Foods,(GMOs).
The executive order followed a Cabinet resolution to have the ban lifted amid protests from a section of Kenyans who had argued that the move would have devastating impacts on the lives of Kenyans.
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