On 26 June 2024, Joshua Okayo was taken from outside his home.
He was a student leader and a vocal protest organizer on X and TikTok. His abductors forced him into a car, blindfolded him and held him for two days at an unknown location. They repeatedly questioned him about the protests and who was financing them. He told Amnesty International that he was beaten and strangled during the interrogations. When he was eventually released, he was abandoned in Murang’a County. His phone was returned to him, but his WhatsApp had been deleted.
A few weeks later, brothers Aslam and Jamil Longton disappeared.
The brothers were subjected to enforced disappearance on 19 August 2024, and their whereabouts remained unknown for about a month. Aslam had been a vocal protest leader in Kitengela. Before the disappearance, a local security official had reportedly warned Jamil to tell his brother to stop participating in protests or “they might harm him”. Their phones were confiscated. During their captivity, the interrogators repeatedly asked who was funding the protests.
Then came Bernard Kavuli.
Bernard was 24 and a student at Mount Kenya University. On the evening of 22 December 2024, after receiving suspicious calls earlier that day, he was forced into a car and told he was under arrest. He was taken somewhere he did not know, stripped naked, handcuffed, and assaulted during questioning. His captors repeatedly questioned him about his posts on X and why he was “troubling the government”. He was denied sufficient food and water for several days and remained in captivity for weeks. Before his release, he was told to stop criticizing the government by people who said it was their job to protect the presidency “under whatever circumstances”.
These are three stories among many.
Amnesty International’s research documented at least 3,000 arbitrary arrests, 83 cases of enforced disappearances and 128 killings in connection with the 2024 and 2025 protests, including violations involving excessive and unlawful use of force by security agencies. The report documents how young people who organized and spoke out online faced a continuum of repression: harassment and threats, coordinated smear campaigns, surveillance, arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance and killing.
For some young activists, the threat began in their inboxes. Mariam*, a 27-year-old human rights defender from Mombasa who was subjected to enforced disappearance for two nights, described receiving threats that went beyond her. Someone sent her the name of her child, their age, school stream, and school bus number plate. She eventually changed her child’s school.
The message was clear: speaking out could put not only you, but the people you love, at risk.
This is what makes enforced disappearance particularly devastating. It takes away more than a person’s liberty. It leaves families searching for answers. It creates fear far beyond the person who is taken, and when those responsible are not held to account, the resulting impunity can deepen fear and chill others who seek to exercise their rights. The digital space has also become a site through which activists can be targeted, monitored, threatened, and silenced.
Amnesty International’s research found that young activists were targeted through coordinated online harassment and smear campaigns. Some were labeled “paid activists” or “foreign agents”. Others received direct threats. The report also found widespread self-censorship among young human rights defenders, with activists changing what and how they posted because they feared that being too outspoken could put them on the radar of government representatives and police and expose them to retaliation, including enforced disappearance. Technology has therefore become intertwined with existing patterns of discrimination, surveillance and repression.
On 30 August, the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, Amnesty International Kenya called on the Government of Kenya to move beyond acknowledgment and promises and take concrete action: investigate every allegation of enforced disappearance, establish the fate and whereabouts of those who have disappeared, prosecute those responsible and provide victims and their families with truth, justice and effective reparations.
This is particularly urgent because we have heard these promises before.
President William Ruto acknowledged in late 2024 that security officials had abused state power and carried out “excessive and extrajudicial actions”. In May 2025, he said that those who had disappeared or been abducted had been returned to their families and that such disappearances would not happen again. Yet survivors and families have continued to face barriers to justice and redress.
On 27 August 2026, the President again spoke about the pain left by past violations and said that no Kenyan should lose their life, liberty or dignity for criticizing the government, expressing an unpopular opinion or participating in a peaceful demonstration. The test is whether those words hold when a young Kenyan uses a phone to criticize the government, joins a protest, posts a meme, organizes other young people, or simply refuses to remain silent.
Joshua survived. Bernard survived. Aslam and Jamil eventually returned. But survival does not erase what happened. Nor does release answer the questions that enforced disappearance leaves behind: Who took them? Who ordered it? How were they identified? Who knew where they were? Who authorized their detention? And who will be held responsible?
Accountability cannot end with the return of a missing person. It extends to the people and institutions responsible.
Amnesty International Kenya’s petition calling for an end to tech-facilitated violence against young activists asks the Government to investigate unlawful surveillance, enforced disappearances, torture and unlawful killings connected to the Gen Z protests, and to provide full reparations to survivors and families. It also calls on X to strengthen its human rights due diligence and tackle coordinated inauthentic behavior, and on Safaricom to submit to an independent investigation into allegations of unlawful customer-data sharing with police and intelligence agencies.
Sign the petition: Stop tech-facilitated violence against young activists in Kenya
Young Kenyans should not have to choose between exercising their rights and protecting their lives.
No one should disappear for exercising their rights.
No family should be left without answers.
And no young person should have to choose silence to stay safe.