The High Court of Kenya ruled in favor of a disabled woman who sued Five Forty Aviation (Fly540) for discrimination after being denied boarding on a flight in 2016.
Judge Ong’udi sitting at the Milimani Law Courts awarded Agnes Mithamo Nyaga KES 400,000 in damages, declaring that the airline’s failure to provide adequate facilities for disabled passengers was “discriminatory, unfair, humiliating and inhuman.”
However, Ong’udi rejected Nyaga’s defamation claims against the airline over its rebuttal of her allegations published in a local newspaper.
“The petitioner failed to tender evidence on how the article affected her reputation in the mind of an ordinary person,” the judge wrote in the ruling.
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Nyaga, a pediatrician who uses walking sticks due to a disability, accused the airline of discrimination after staff failed to provide a wheelchair lift when she attempted to board a flight from Eldoret to Nairobi in April 2016.
In her lawsuit, Nyaga alleged that the pilot stopped her from boarding over the delay and told her “it would take 40 minutes to get her up the stairs.” She said she was forced to spend the night at the airport.
The airline disputed Nyaga’s account, claiming she had refused staff assistance and pushed away the pilot during a heated dispute.
Ong’udi sided with Nyaga, finding she was discriminated against under Kenyan law requiring reasonable accommodations for disabled passengers. But the judge dismissed Nyaga’s defamation claims over the airline’s public response.
“I find defamation to be fundamentally the making of a false statement that discredits a person leading to injury of that person’s reputation,” Ong’udi wrote. “The petitioner failed to prove the alleged defamatory nature of the article.”
