Ruling on the switch: Courts, regional tribunals and the persistence of internet shutdowns in Africa

Abstract

Purpose. African courts and regional human rights bodies have built, over roughly a decade, a coherent legal prohibition on internet shutdowns. The African Commission resolved against the practice in 2016 and declared it impermissible in 2019. The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice has twice held that shutting down the internet or blocking a platform violates the African Charter, and a domestic court has set aside a shutdown within two days of its imposition. Over the same period the practice has not declined. Access Now recorded 21 shutdowns across 15 African countries in 2024, the highest figure ever recorded for the region. This article asks why a settled legal prohibition has produced so little compliance.

Methods. The article is a documentary and institutional analysis of three judgments, two regional instruments and the recorded shutdown events that followed them. It reads the judgments for what they actually order, against whom, on what grounds and at what price, and compares that to the incentive structure facing the actors who carry out a shutdown.

Findings. The gap is not explained by judicial weakness or by the absence of law. It is explained by four features of the remedies themselves. Relief arrives after the harm is complete, since a shutdown lasting days achieves its object long before a court sits. Orders bind the state while the switch is thrown by licensed private operators whose incentives the judgments leave untouched. Where a domestic court moved quickly it decided on the narrow ground that the wrong official had signed, which a government can satisfy by changing signatory. Damages are nominal or refused outright, leaving the expected cost of a shutdown far below its political value. Togo, ordered in June 2020 to prevent recurrence and to legislate, disrupted access again in June 2025.

Implications. Post hoc rights adjudication is the wrong instrument for a harm that is short, reversible and self-completing. The article sets out what would bind instead: ex ante judicial authorisation, statutory duties and transparency obligations placed on operators as well as ministries, and damages calibrated to the political benefit of the act rather than to provable individual loss.