From October 1952 to December 1963, Kenya was under a colonial state of emergency as the British fought the Mau Mau insurgency. Emergency rules banned political organisations and allowed detention without trial. In 2013 the British government itself said that many of those detained were never tried, and that the colonial authorities used capital punishment on an unprecedented scale and ran harsh so-called "rehabilitation" regimes.
For decades, a key part of the evidence was missing from public view. In 2011, while fighting a lawsuit brought by elderly Kenyan veterans, the Foreign Office said it had become aware of a large collection of files sent to Britain from former territories around independence. A minister explained that colonial administrations had shipped home documents "not appropriate to hand on to the successor government". The collection was about 8,800 files from 37 former administrations, and the Foreign Secretary promised to release them through The National Archives.
In June 2013, the government settled. It recognised that Kenyans "were subject to torture and other forms of ill treatment at the hands of the colonial administration", said it "sincerely regrets" the abuses and agreed to pay 5,228 claimants, with costs, a total of £19.9 million. It also backed a memorial in Nairobi. In the same statement, it continued to deny legal liability. Regret, with no liability: that's the receipt.