Police Impunity and Compliance with Human Rights Standards in Tanzania: A Comparative Analysis of Tanzania and Kenya

Police officers exercise the most coercive powers of the state, and the legitimacy of those powers depends on how effectively their abuse is investigated, sanctioned and remedied. This article examines police impunity and compliance with human rights standards in Tanzania through a comparative doctrinal analysis with Kenya. Tanzania’s accountability architecture remains predominantly internal: disciplinary authority sits largely within the Police Force under the Inspector General, and the only external body with a mandate over police complaints, the Commission for Human Rights and Good Governance, can make only non-binding recommendations, enforceable only through court action. Kenya’s 2010 Constitution, by contrast, entrenches police professionalism, transparency and accountability and separates discipline from operational command through the National Police Service Commission, while Kenyan statute establishes the Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA), which the High Court has held has exclusive jurisdiction over deaths and serious injuries caused by police action. Drawing on Principal-Agent Theory, Democratic Policing Theory and the Human Rights-Based Approach, supported by Institutional Theory, the article finds that the two states share the same binding obligations under the ICCPR and the African Charter but diverge sharply in domestic institutional design. Kenya produces verifiable, if still modest, outcomes in the form of published data and convictions of officers; comparable Tanzanian data is unavailable. Kenya’s own backlog, delay and continuing custodial deaths nevertheless show that institutional design alone cannot eliminate impunity. The article recommends constitutional entrenchment of police accountability standards, separation of disciplinary authority from operational command, an independent oversight authority with exclusive jurisdiction over serious misconduct, a statutory duty on the prosecuting authority to respond to oversight recommendations, publication of outcome data and protected resourcing, while cautioning against uncritical legal transplantation.