According to the Standing Committee on Human Rights, between July 1996 and February 1998, 394 written petitions/complaints were received on various human rights issues. The Standing Committee was able to investigate and address only eighty-seven of those cases due in part to a lack of resources. The individual complaints included petitions to challenge unfair dismissal from the police force, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, lack of fair trial, unfair dismissal from the Teacher's Service Commission, reinstatement for back pay, police harassment, loss of earnings resulting from human rights abuse, denial of the right to education, and ethnic discrimination.127 The Standing Committee for Human Rights asserts that it investigated the various individual claims and made recommendations to the president. The report, however, is silent about whether their recommendations were followed. The Standing Committee also traveled around the country to Provincial headquarters receiving complaints and holding seminars and public meetings on human rights issues.

By late 1999, the Standing Committee had written and submitted to the president four confidential reports on its investigations and recommendations, and two special reports on political violence that had occurred at the Coast Province in August 1997 and in the Rift Valley Province in early 1998, commonly referred to as the ethnic clashes. The Standing Committee also conducted human rights education outreach programs around the country at all the local provincial headquarters where public meetings were held on human rights. Since 1997, the Standing Committee has sporadically issued a small newsletter in English entitled "Haki Zetu." It recently received funding to expand and publish the newsletter in English and Kiswahili.

The Standing Committee issued its first, and so far only, public report in December 1998. It appeared to be drawn from the confidential reports submitted to the president. The 170-page report is largely a general overview of human rights laws and definitions, with only cursory reference to official human rights abuses. The first two chapters read like a rudimentary academic paper on the concept and definition of human rights under international law. While this is a useful exercise for the Standing Committee members' edification, its contribution to the average Kenyan is little or none. In subsequent chapters, the Standing Committee summarizes some of the individual cases that it had dealt with including its recommendations. Other chapters deal with thematic issues, such as the status of women and children, and land distribution. Some of the recommendations on these issues are well drafted, however, it is unclear to what end it will used. They do not bind the government and the Standing Committee appears marginal to government policymaking. No government ministry or department seems to act on the basis of consultation and cooperation with the Standing Committee for Human Rights.

The Standing Committee's chapters on the political violence that occurred in both the Coast Province and the Rift Valley Province are the most detailed and comprehensive examination of a major human rights problem in Kenya. Since the government was forced to concede to multipartyism in 1991, some 400,000 Kenyans have been systematically attacked and displaced from their homes by state-sponsored violence targeting ethnic groups perceived to support the political opposition. The role of known high-ranking government officials, who remain unpunished, in instigating, inflaming, and financing this violence has been widely documented, not only by national and international human rights NGOs, but also by the government's own parliamentary select committee (which consisted of only ruling party members).128

The Standing Committee's chapter on the political violence in the Rift Valley Province (the president's home province, which also has the largest number of parliamentary seats) is very careful not to address any of the politically sensitive issues that touch on the government's role in the violence. Rather, the Standing Committee is quick to condemn the independent media's reporting on the violence as "inflammatory, lacking precise detail and sometimes designed to support and enhance particular political and sectarian views."129 It condemns the religious and NGO communities for being "unguarded, to the extent of recklessness in their assumptions about the causes of the violence . . . especially as regards the role of the government on this matter [which] has been exaggerated and even distorted."130 However, when it comes to addressing the government's role, the Standing Committee only notes: "The Committee is not persuaded, as others are, that the Government is in any way involved in the planning and persistence of violence . . . The government appears fully determined to ensure that the violence is at least contained if not totally eliminated."131 The chapter on the violence at the Coast Province is a more frank assessment of the situation. The Standing Committee's investigative methodology is described and its limitations acknowledged. In this chapter, the Standing Committee has put forward both the government's view of the violence as well as the public consensus that the violence at the Coast was politically instigated and that ruling party officials used the government machinery in order to displace potential opposition voters before the election, although it stops short of endorsing the latter conclusion. The chair of the Standing Committee on Human Rights also publicly testified on its investigations before a presidential Commission on the Ethnic Clashes.132