There were no reports of abuses of religious freedom.
The government continued to restrict the activities of Mungiki, a movement formed 20 years ago among ethnic Kikuyu as a traditional religious group. The group is outlawed and the government has frequently accused it of acting as a criminal network, including involvement in gang activities.
When registering with the Registrar of Societies, religious groups generally received equal treatment from the government; however, some smaller groups found it difficult to register when the government viewed them as an offshoot of a larger religious organization.
Some Muslim leaders charged the government was hostile toward Muslims. According to Muslim leaders, authorities rigorously scrutinized the identification cards of persons with Muslim surnames, particularly ethnic Somalis, and sometimes required additional documentation of citizenship, such as birth certificates of parents and even grandparents. The government continued to state the heightened scrutiny was an attempt to deter illegal immigration, rather than to discriminate against ethnic Somalis or their religion.
Some Muslim leaders, particularly in Coast Province, asserted that, as a mechanism to diminish their political power, the most recent government census radically undercounted Muslims. The courts, however, have rejected challenges to the census numbers.
Muslim leaders also accused the government of using the pretense of fighting terrorism to arrest and deport Muslim scholars, as well as target Islamic NGOs in overly broad security operations. These critics asserted the government failed to differentiate violent extremists from legitimate scholars and religious NGOs. These charges increased in frequency after the government military incursion into Somalia in October and subsequent attacks inside Kenya, some of which the government has linked to the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab. Government security forces subjected citizens of Somali origin, who are predominantly Muslim, to occasional arbitrary detention, based on perceived links to extremists.
Some Muslim human rights activists continued to call for the disbandment of the Anti-Terrorism Prevention Unit, a specialized police unit within the Ministry of Provincial Administration and Internal Security, alleging that it was engaged in a systematic campaign of harassment that specifically targeted Muslims, including extortion of businesspeople and theft during raids.
Government schools sometimes prevented girls from attending classes if they wore a headscarf or other religious dress. For example, the Akorino sect (found in Central as well as parts of Western and Nyanza provinces) combines Christian and African styles of worship and requires women to cover their heads. School authorities have ordered female students who were members of the sect to remove their headscarves while in school, stating such garments were in violation of school uniform policies.
After killings of individuals accused by others of witchcraft, local authorities sometimes responded by placing those suspected of witchcraft in protective custody to prevent lynching. Government officials routinely criticized vigilantism against those accused of witchcraft, but also claimed to initiate crackdowns against those practicing traditional medicine, which was associated with witchcraft in many communities and which the authorities sometimes considered to be fraud or practicing medicine without a license.