Navigate easily through over fifty thousand pages of sections, schedules, rules and regulations. You can also use our powerful full-text search tool to quickly query the StatutesOnline database.
How much does it cost?
Use of StatutesOnline is charged per minute meaning one only pays for what one uses. Access to StatutesOnline requires your account to be topped up with Access Hours. One Access Hour is equivalent to sixty minutes of use and costs K.Shs. 50. This means approximately one shilling for each minute of access.
Read our Payments Section for more information on how to obtain Access Hours.
Background of the Laws of Kenya
The Laws of Kenya is a collection of over 450 chapters containing statute law applicable in Kenya. The Laws of Kenya is a particularly dynamic library of legislation. Each week Parliament, Cabinet Ministers or other empowered bodies amend the Laws of Kenya to reflect new or amended legislation.
The Government Printer is responsible for publishing and revising the Laws of Kenya. The Laws are published on both a set of fifteen loose-leaf bound volumes and on Kenya Gazzette supplements produced yearly.
However, a provision which is in force, and purports to state the law, may be subjected to numerous amendments which are not incorporated into the main text of the Act. Each of these amendments describes changes to the text of the Act as it was originally enacted. Periodically the Government Printer compiles and publishes consolidations of these amendments and reprints the substantive Acts, that is they print a version of the Act as it is at a particular time with all the textual changes applied to it. However since 1992 the Government Printer has not published an index of amendments and has only made piecemeal revisions to selected Acts.
As an example, the Income Tax Act Cap 470 was last consolidated in 1989. Since then over 50 Acts and Legal Notices have made amendments to it with more than 300 individual amendment operations. A lawyer needing to add this Act to her personal library would need to purchase from the Government Printer, the 1989 consolidation and each of the fifty plus Acts and Legal Notices that have amended it since 1989. Then she would need to manually apply each of those fifty Acts in turn to the 1989 consolidation. Considering that finding the fifty Acts and Legal Notices is made difficult due to lack of an Index of Amendments, it is extremely difficult to verify the completeness of any particular consolidation. It is also generally recognised that the physical alteration of principal legislation to take account of textual amendments is tedious and, where there is extensive amendment, it may be in practice virtually impossible.
See image of physically amended Act
StatutesOnline, the Solution.
StatutesOnline main objectives are:
1.To provide an inexpensive library of the text of the law.
2.To make more timely availability of amendments and consolidations.
3.To improve access to Kenyan legislation. By making legislation available on the Web, it is readily available to a wide audience and easily searchable.
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