When Angola’s government switched off the national internet for the first time in its recorded history on a Saturday in late July 2025, the trigger was not an election or war.
People had taken to the streets over the rising price of fuel.
The authorities’ own figures put the death toll at at least 22; civil society monitors counted 30 dead and more than 1,500 arrests.
That episode sits inside a pattern documented by Ephraim Percy Kenyanito, an international lawyer who has published a monthly record of technology, media and telecommunications law across Africa since January 2014.
In a piece for Global Voices, he writes that the roundup reached its 152nd consecutive edition in August.
Counting only entries where a government itself restricted, throttled or cut a network, and setting aside closures of individual broadcasters, he found more than 70 separate episodes across 32 countries, every year since 2014.
Access Now’s KeepItOn coalition, he writes, counted independently and arrived at the same number.
The usual definition is inadequate
The distinction Kenyanito draws is between two state responses to online dissent. In the first, a person posts and the state prosecutes that person, using cybercrime statutes, false-news provisions or computer misuse acts, with a named individual as the target.
He writes that he has found roughly 70 examples of that every year since 2014, citing Ethiopia’s Zone 9 bloggers in 2014, the co-founder of Jamii Forums under Tanzania’s Cybercrimes Act in 2016, Ignace Sossou in Benin in 2019, and two journalists in Mali in June.
In the second, many people gather and the state prosecutes nobody. Instead, it cuts the network.
Algeria, every June during exams
Kenyanito notes that assemblies of dissent are not the only trigger for shutdowns, and that an argument claiming otherwise overstates its case.
Algeria has cut the national internet every year during baccalaureate exams to stop candidates circulating exam papers, and Kenya blocked Telegram during its own national examinations in 2023 and 2024.
In those instances, he writes, there was no crowd, no protest and no opinion the state wanted suppressed.
What the exam shutdowns settle, in his reading, is that the state reached for the network because the network was what people would use to coordinate.
A shutdown, he argues, is not a speech instrument but an instrument for preventing coordinated action.
Article 9 or Article 11 of the African Charter
That framing changes which provision of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights applies, Kenyanito writes.
Shutdowns are almost always litigated as freedom of expression problems under Article 9, while Article 11 protects the right to assemble freely with others.
The two clauses differ: Article 9(2) gives everyone the right to express and disseminate opinions “within the law,” whereas Article 11 permits “only necessary restrictions provided for by law.”
Necessity appears on the face of Article 11 and is absent from Article 9.
The same split exists outside Africa. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights protects peaceful assembly in Article 21, and in 2020 the UN Human Rights Committee issued General Comment 37 setting out what that article means.
Kenyanito writes that it reads Article 21 as covering assemblies held online and the organizing of assemblies held in the street, and that on shutdowns it is explicit: states must not “block or hinder Internet connectivity in relation to peaceful assemblies,” nor engage in “geo-targeted or technology-specific interference with connectivity.”
He also points to the African Commission’s 2017 Guidelines on Freedom of Association and Assembly, which he describes as treating assembly as something a state must positively enable rather than merely refrain from crushing, and to its 2019 Declaration of Principles.
Principle 37(1) says states “shall facilitate” expression and access to information online. Principle 38(1) permits interference with content where it is “justifiable and compatible with international human rights law and standards.”
Principle 38(2), which prohibits “any disruption of access to the Internet … for segments of the public or an entire population,” carries no such qualifier.
Kenyanito calls the asymmetry deliberate and says it is doing far less work than it should. He notes the Declaration is soft law, a real limitation, while calling it the clearest statement of the continent’s standard on access rights.
Cameroon’s Anglophone regions lost access for more than a year from January 2017 in a bid to clamp down on dissent, and Fizi territory in South Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo, was offline for over a month from July 2026, according to his account.
Litigators are not the only ones relying on Article 9, Kenyanito writes.
In 2024 the African Commission itself adopted a resolution on internet shutdowns during elections that treats a shutdown as harmful to expression and access to information under Article 9. It does not mention assembly at all.
The claim nobody argued
The clearest test of the assembly argument so far came from Senegal.
Ndiaga Gueye, who runs a Senegalese technology users’ association, took the government to the ECOWAS Court of Justice after it cut mobile internet during the protests of June and July 2023.
He pleaded expression and access to information under Article 9, the right to work under Article 15, and assembly under Article 11 of the African Charter and Article 21 of the Covenant.
On May 14, 2025, the Court ruled in his favor on grounds of expression, applying a four-part test of legality, legitimate aim, necessity and proportionality and holding that Senegal failed on all four: no law authorized the cuts, no evidence of the threat was produced, fewer restrictive measures existed, and a blanket shutdown was neither necessary nor proportionate.
It also ruled that the shutdowns violated his right to work. His assembly claim went nowhere.
Two applicants had brought it, the association and Gueye himself; the Court dismissed the association’s assembly claim because it was not argued or supported, and while it accepted that Gueye was entitled to bring his, it decided the case on expression and the right to work and never ruled on whether the shutdown violated his right to assembly.
The judgments are thinner than they look
Kenyanito’s assessment of the litigation record is that it delivers less than advocacy suggests.
Zimbabwe’s High Court set aside the January 2019 shutdown directives within days, but on the ground that the minister of state had no power to issue them, the president having reserved administration of the Interception of Communications Act to himself; the court expressly declined the constitutional question.
The ECOWAS Court held Togo’s 2017 shutdown unlawful in June 2020, but because Togo conceded that no law authorized it, the Court never reached whether a shutdown could ever be necessary or proportionate.
In Kenya, Justice Bahati Mwamuye issued a conservatory order on May 14, 2025 restraining a shutdown pending hearing, and by June rights groups were demanding compliance with it.
Zimbabwe and Togo, he writes, are wins on legality rather than on the content of the right; neither tells a government what it may do once it has passed a law.
Senegal is the exception: the first African ruling to hold that a shutdown fails a necessity and proportionality test, reached under Article 9 and without mention of Article 11. Shutdowns continued regardless.
Tanzania cut the internet during its October 2025 election and Uganda ordered a blackout before the January 2026 vote. Angola’s first shutdown in its history came 10 weeks after two courts ruled on the same day.
How to change the pattern?
Kenyanito’s prescription is that litigators and human rights activists must argue the assembly claim rather than merely list it.
Gueye’s case, he writes, shows what happens otherwise: the right was named in the pleadings and disposed of for want of evidence and argument, while the court went to work on the claims that had been built.
The positive duty in the 2017 Guidelines, in his view, is harder for a government to argue around than a proportionality test on content, but only if someone puts it in front of a judge properly.
He also argues that operators should be named.
Shutdowns are executed by licensed companies on instructions that are frequently unwritten and sometimes unlawful under the licensee’s own domestic law, he writes, noting that civil society wrote to MTN about Sudan in 2019 and that license conditions remain a lever barely pulled.
His final point is that non-compliance should be treated as an enforcement failure rather than an open legal question: when a Kenyan court restrains a shutdown and the disruption continues, the deficiency is not in the law.
The right to digital protest in Africa, he concludes, does not need inventing. It needs locating, and governments have spent 12 years showing where it sits: every time a crowd has gathered and the network has gone quiet.
Source: Global Voices
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