Scarica PDF
Abstract
In July 2020, the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice ordered Nigeria to repeal or amend Section 24 of its Cybercrime (Prohibition, Prevention, etc.) Act 2015, finding that the provision violated Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Nigeria did not comply for four years. A second ruling in 2022 reinforced the order. During the interval, Section 24 continued to be used to arrest journalists, bloggers, and critics of the government. The Cybercrimes (Amendment) Act 2024 eventually addressed some of the language, though disputes remain about whether the changes achieve full compliance.
This article uses that four-year delay as its subject. The argument is not that Nigeria was wrong to delay. The question is what the delay reveals about how regional cyber law harmonisation actually works when a member state has no financial incentive to comply and its executive has a political interest in retaining the statute. The article draws on the transnational law literature, the sociology of international adjudication compliance, and the institutional architecture of the ECOWAS system to identify three structural factors: the absence of any coercive mechanism in the ECOWAS Treaty framework, the political economy of cybercrime legislation in Nigeria, and the mismatch between how long international adjudication takes and how fast digital rights violations accumulate. It concludes with proposals for a compliance monitoring committee, more specific provisional measures, and linkage between cyber rights compliance and the ECOWAS digital trade framework.
Keywords: ECOWAS Court of Justice; cybercrime legislation; freedom of expression; West Africa; transnational law; compliance; regional human rights systems; digital rights
