This even as they pushed for an order compelling President Uhuru Kenyatta to refund public money spent on the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI).

The seven-judge bench at the Court of Appeal was on Friday urged to order President Kenyatta to personally return taxpayer money spent on the BBI, which was declared by the High Court as an “unconstitutional process of changing the Constitution”.

Lawyer Chrispin Andole, urged the appellate court to order the Auditor-General to establish the amount of taxpayer money spent on promoting BBI.

Veteran lawyer John Khaminwa, who represented Kituo Cha Sheria and the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) told the court to deny President Kenyatta a hearing over disobedience of court orders and demeaning of judges in public.

“President Kenyatta has filed an application and I am inviting you, very respectfully, to not take note of the application. When you come to the court you must come with clean hands, the President has not come to this court with clean hands at all. When you have a President who ignores court orders and demeans judges; this court should stand firm and say no, we shall not hear you,” submitted Dr Khaminwa.

The court was also told that the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) violated its own rules on the verification of signatures of voters who endorsed the Bill, which sought amendment.

For instance, the court heard that the Commission denied Kenyans adequate access and time to confirm whether their details had been erroneously used to endorse the Bill. They said that although IEBC’s procedures provided for a two-week period for voters to confirm their details, the period was reduced to five days, including a weekend.

Lawyer Caroline Kituku for the Muslim for Human Rights (Muhuri) said that at the time the IEBC received the Bill, it could not satisfactorily discharge its mandate for lack of a legal framework to process the Bill.

“It was the mandate of Parliament to make laws on conduct of a referendum,” she said. She added that IEBC also contradicted itself in its appeal against the High Court judgment noting that the commission did data cleaning of the signatures presented to it instead of verifying the details.

 She said that while IEBC lawyer Eric Gumbo said the agency does not have a database of voters’ signatures, his colleague Micheal Goa said it has the data from when Kenyans register as voters. Ms Kituku said IEBC had in a letter to Muhuri also said it does not have the database.

She added that IEBC also failed to return to the public the list of verified signatures for the said voters to confirm that indeed they were not erroneously listed.

The court further heard that the IEBC violated Article 10 of the Constitution on public participation by failing to ensure that the BBI proponents had adequately involved Kenyans in the process of coming up with the proposal for a referendum.

According to the lawyers, another section of the Constitution violated by the IEBC is Article 82(2) , which provides that legislations required for the conduct of elections and referenda should ensure that voting is simple, transparent and takes into account those with special needs.

The lawyers also stated that IEBC could not conduct business because the statute (IEBC Act) requires a quorum of five commissioners.