Revisiting Court-Annexed Mediation: Whose dispute is it? The illusion of party autonomy and the diminished advocate's duty to the client

Abstract
Kenya\'s Court-Annexed Mediation (CAM) programme marks a decade of institutionalised dispute resolution, having achieved notable statistical milestones including the settlement of disputes worth over Ksh 52.2 billion and a consistent settlement rate exceeding 55% across 82 registries nationwide. Yet beneath these celebrated metrics lies a structural and jurisprudential contradiction that this article subjects to sustained critical scrutiny. The Civil Procedure (Court-Annexed Mediation) Rules, 2022, enacted as Legal Notice 145 of 2022, have progressively shifted CAM from a consensual, party-driven forum into a mandatory institutional mechanism, eroding the foundational principle of party autonomy upon which all ADR is constitutionally premised. The article argues that the compulsory screening, unilateral court referral, registrar-driven mediator appointment, and penalty-backed timelines embedded in the 2022 Rules do not merely strain the 1 ADR model, they invert it, transforming mediation from a choice into a compulsion and settlement from an expression of self-determination into an institutional performance metric. The article further interrogates how this structural inversion has re-cast the advocate\'s professional role in ways that are irreconcilable with the orthodox duty to the client, generating a tension between zealous representation and mandated facilitation that the current legal framework has failed to resolve. 

1. Introduction:

A decade of achievement and a growing structural anxiety There is a particular institutional satisfaction in announcing that an initiative has worked. Since Kenya\'s Court-Annexed Mediation programme was formally launched in April 2016 pursuant to the constitutional mandate under Article 159(2)(c) of the Constitution of Kenya, 2010, the Judiciary has had much to announce.1 The 2025 State of the Judiciary  read more...