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protect them. Everyone from high court judges and magistrates in Kenya to researchers and law school professors in Canada believe these girlswill win and that the victory will set a precedent that will alter the status of women in Kenya and maybe all of Africa.
    These are grand claims for redressing a crime as old as Methuselah, but the researchers and lawyers working on the case insist that the evidence is on their side.
    The suit is the brainchild of Fiona Sampson, project director of the Equality Effect, a non-profit organization located in Canada that uses international human rights law to improve the lives of girls and women. It came about by way of a touch of serendipity and a lot of tenacity. Sampson was doing a master’s degree at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto in 2002 when she met fellow students Winifred Kamau, a lecturer from the University of Nairobi Law School, and Elizabeth Archampong, vice dean at the Faculty of Law in Kwame Nkrumah University in Ghana who had come to Canada to study international law. Their mutual interest in equality rights drew the women together. A few years later, when Seodi White, a lawyer from Malawi was a visiting scholar at the International Women’s Human Rights Project at the University of Toronto, the trio became a foursome. When the African women wondered if the model used in Canada in the early eighties to reform the law around sexual assault—in which legal activists successfully lobbied to rewrite the law, educate the judiciary and raise awareness with the public—could work in Africa, Sampson started thinking about ways to tackle the entrenched violence against women in countries like Kenya, Malawi and Ghana.
    Eight years after their initial meeting, the quartet gathered in Nairobi in 2010 with the pick of the human rights legal crop from Canada and Africa for the historic launch of Three to Be Free, a program that targets three countries, Kenya, Malawi andGhana, with three strategies—litigation, policy reform and legal education over three years in order to alter the status of women. Their intention was to tackle marital rape and make it a crime. But when the lawyers returned home and started their research, another serendipitous meeting took place. A woman named Mercy Chidi was in Toronto taking a course at the Women’s Human Rights Education Institute at the University of Toronto. One of the lawyers working on the marital rape case, Mary Eberts, was teaching the course and heard Chidi’s story. She called Sampson and suggested she meet Chidi, who was the director of a non-governmental organization called Ripples International in Meru, Kenya. Chidi told Sampson about the shelter she runs for girls who have been raped and can’t go home because the men who raped them are still at large. They both knew it was time to tackle the root of the problem—the impunity of rapists and the failure of the justice system to convict them.
    Sampson admits it was her own sense of urgency that made the concept take flight. “I am the last thalidomide child to be born in Canada,” she explains, referring to the anti-morning-sickness drug whose side effects in utero had affected the development of her hands and arms. (The drug was banned in Canada in 1962.) “There was a culture of impunity in the testing of drugs at that time,” she explains, “so I’m consumed with the desire to seek justice in the face of impunity.”
    Kenya has laws on its books designed to protect girls from rape, or “defilement.” The state is responsible for the police and the way police enforce existing laws. Since the police in Kenya failed to arrest the perpetrators and fail on an ongoing basis to provide the protection girls need, the lawyers are filing notice that the state is responsible for the breakdown in the system. Sampsonsays, “We will argue that the failure to protect the girls from rape is actually a human rights violation, that it’s a violation of the equality provisions of the