Hansard in the Parliament of Kenya

The rule book

The National Assembly Standing Orders, 7th Edition, were adopted by the National Assembly on 9 January 2013 and incorporate later amendments ¹. Part of the Standing Orders deals with journals, records and broadcast of proceedings, including Standing Order 247 on custody of journals and records, 248 on Hansard reports, 249 on secret or personal matters and 250 on broadcast of House proceedings ¹.

Parliament's website lists a Directorate of Hansard and Audio Services among its offices and publishes the Hansard by sitting ².

The Parliament of South Africa, another Commonwealth parliament, describes a Hansard as a substantially verbatim report with repetitions and redundancies omitted and obvious mistakes corrected ⁵.

Deadlines for the verbatim report

Standing Order 248(1) requires a verbatim report of all proceedings of the House to be published within forty-eight hours ¹. The exception is where the Speaker is satisfied that this has been made impossible by some emergency ¹.

Standing Order 248(1A) sets seventy-two hours for a verbatim report of all proceedings of a committee of the House where evidence is given, again subject to the Speaker ¹.

Corrections and disputes

Under Standing Order 248(2), every Member has an opportunity to correct the draft verbatim report of their contribution, but not so as to alter the substance of what the Member actually said ¹. Canada's House of Commons draws the same line. Members there may suggest corrections and minor alterations but may not make material changes to the meaning of what was said ⁴.

Standing Order 248(3) gives the Speaker the final role. Where there is doubt as to the content of the verbatim record of the House, the Speaker makes a determination ¹.

What may be left out

Standing Order 249 lets the Speaker direct that any matter which in the Speaker's opinion is secret or purely personal be excluded from the Journals and from the verbatim report of the House and its committees ¹. Such matter becomes the subject of a separate verbatim report, kept in the custody of the Clerk and made available only to Members ¹.

For a quote check, a gap in the public Hansard at a point where a Member was speaking may reflect a Speaker's direction under this rule. The public record will not contain the excluded words ¹.

Video links and certified copies

Standing Order 250 provides that proceedings of the House and its committees may be broadcast, and broadcasting rules set out under that Standing Order deal with a Parliamentary Broadcasting Unit ¹. The National Assembly Hansard page lists each sitting by date, separating morning and afternoon sittings, with a link to the plenary video ². On the date checked, the latest entries were the afternoon and morning sittings of Wednesday, 21 October 2026 and the sitting of Thursday, 22 October 2026 ².

Electronic Hansard files can carry a status note. A Senate Hansard report for Thursday, 19 March 2015 states on each page that the electronic version is for information purposes only and that a certified version can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate ³. Where the exact wording matters, the certified version is the one the report itself points to ³.

• Find the sitting by date on the Hansard page, noting whether it was a morning or afternoon sitting ².
• Read the passage in the Hansard text, then compare it with the plenary video linked for the same sitting ².
• Check whether the passage could be a draft that the Member was entitled to correct ¹.
• For formal use, ask the Hansard Editor for a certified version ³.