Kenya protesters demand justice on anniversary of deadly 2024 unrest

Police blocked access roads to the Kenyan Parliament Building in Nairobi and fired tear gas as protesters, families of victims and opposition figures gathered to mark the anniversary of the 2024 anti-tax unrest. Outside parliament, mourners laid flowers and wreaths on barbed wire barricades, turning the security cordon into a memorial for the dozens killed in last year’s demonstrations.

The protests remembered on June 25 were triggered by opposition to the Kenya Finance Bill 2024 and anger over the rising cost of living. On June 25, 2024, demonstrators stormed parliament in Nairobi, and police responded with force as the unrest spread across the country. More than 60 people were killed in the anti-government demonstrations, with some tallies putting the death toll at at least 62 and others, when the deaths from both 2024 and the following year’s remembrance marches are included, rising to more than 80.

The anniversary has become a recurring date of protest as well as mourning. In 2025, similar remembrance marches were met with heavy police security, and this year’s gathering again placed President William Ruto’s government under scrutiny over the use of force and the pace of accountability. Families of the dead have kept returning to the same barricades, pressing for answers that have not come.

One year after the 2024 killings, the Independent Policing Oversight Authority had completed just 22 investigations, with 36 more still ongoing. No police officers had been held accountable in the cases cited at that stage, a backlog that has sharpened anger among relatives who say the state has moved faster to contain protests than to answer for the deaths.

The clashes around parliament have become a national test of whether Kenya’s security agencies will face consequences for the violence that followed the Finance Bill protests. For families standing behind the barbed wire, the flowers and wreaths were a simple public record of grief, but the demand beneath them remained the same: a year of remembrance without justice has left the case against impunity unresolved.