I almost get it Kadame. Some cases are dismissed before any hearing - something about merit. Such cases don't get a 3-judge bench and take a very short time. Is this a literal dismissal? Please avoid the conjecture about intimidation for a moment. I want to understand what legally happened.
Robina, you're still making it about 'not following basic procedure'. It's just how when a judge wants to rule a certain way apriori, he can do it by emphasizing a minor issue over a more important one, like a game of ducking. In this case, using the minor issue (a mere technicality) of the gazettement of an image as a national symbol to skirt around a substantive constitutional prohibition of such images. Playing redefinition games about what a 'portrait' is. It's nothing fancy. People do it all the time in support of their favourite ideologies. For some reason, lots of lay people assume judges are somehow immune to these human biases and games. Yet we have entire academic traditions studying precisely how judges find a way to justify decisions they already committed to.
The intimidation is not silly conjecture: it comes from how plainly obvious it is what these judges do, and I knew it the moment i heard about this case. That's not a very comfortable position to be in and I'm sure the moment Uhuru is gone, these very same courts will completely rubbish any idea that you can get away from constitutional requirements by gazetting the prohibited stuff (and thereby simply declaring them constitutional by that mere act). In other words, it's doing the law by exploiting any and all loopholes rather than committing to its substantive aims: Our courts were masters of this in Moi's era and so we put it in the constitution that it's illegal to ignore substance in favour of technicalities. Yet, here we are.
