Africa’s governments already treat the internet as protest infrastructure. Its courts have not caught up

Since 2014, African governments have cut internet access more than 70 times across 32 countries, not just to suppress speech but to prevent coordinated action and disperse assemblies before they form. Legal challenges to these shutdowns typically frame them as violations of free expression rights under Article 9 of the African Charter, but this approach has yielded limited success because shutdowns fundamentally restrict the right to assembly under Article 11, which requires governments to meet a stricter "necessity" standard. While international human rights frameworks explicitly prohibit internet disruptions related to peaceful assemblies, African courts have rarely ruled on assembly claims because advocates fail to properly argue them in litigation.