Justice Hellen Wasilwa of the Employment and Labour Relations Court declined a petition by former Saudi embassy employee Abdikadir Mohamed Abdullahi seeking to have Ambassador Khalid bin Abdullah Al‑Salman committed to civil jail for allegedly defying a 2019 court order.

The judge held that contempt proceedings could not be pursued against the ambassador in his personal capacity and that the proper route would be to order the embassy to show cause before executing the decree, rather than issuing an arrest warrant.

Abdikadir had asked the court to imprison the ambassador for six months and to seize embassy property after the embassy failed to satisfy a judgment ordering payment of $310,282 (about Sh40 million) and 54,000 Saudi riyals (about Sh1.8 million) by September 2019.

The 2019 judgment found Abdikadir’s termination in 2014 unlawful, linking it to his complaints about salary arrears that the embassy had acknowledged, and set interest at 14 percent per annum from February 2015 until full payment.

Despite serving the decree through Kenya’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in October 2020 and receiving confirmation of its forwarding in March 2023, Abdikadir says the embassy has not paid the award for more than five years.

The Saudi embassy argued that summoning the ambassador would breach diplomatic immunity, effectively subjecting the Saudi monarch to Kenyan legal processes and risking a diplomatic dispute.

The court’s decision leaves the enforcement of the original award pending, with the embassy still responsible for satisfying the decree, while the ambassador remains protected by diplomatic immunity from personal contempt sanctions.