Kenya's High Court has drawn a firm line between fighting cybercrime and empowering an administrative committee to censor the internet on its own say-so. On July 2, 2026, Justice Nyaundi Patricia Mande of the High Court at Milimani struck down Section 6(1)(jA) and Section 27(1)(b) of the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes (Amendment) Act, 2025, ruling both provisions unconstitutional under Article 24 of Kenya's Constitution (Kenya Law, Act No. 5 of 2018 as amended).
What the Law Actually Did
Section 6(1)(jA) empowered the National Computer and Cybercrimes Co-ordination Committee (NC4) — a multi-agency body chaired within the security establishment — to issue a directive rendering any website or application "inaccessible" if it determined the platform promoted unlawful activity, terrorism, religious extremism, cultism, or child sexual content (Kenya Law). No court order. No adversarial hearing. No published evidentiary threshold. Section 27(1)(b), meanwhile, criminalized any electronic communication "likely to cause" another person to commit suicide — a standard that hinges on speculation about a message's downstream psychological effect on an unknown recipient, not on the sender's actual conduct or intent.
Justice Mande's judgment is unambiguous about why this matters. The court held that Section 6(1)(jA) amounted to unconstitutional prior restraint — "one of the harshest limitations on freedom of expression" — because it let an administrative body decide what Kenyans could read before any judicial body weighed in (Tuko; ICJ Kenya). Notably, the court also observed that Parliament had already built a separate, court-supervised blocking mechanism elsewhere in the Act — making NC4's parallel unilateral power not just unchecked but structurally redundant, a sign the committee's authority was designed to bypass judicial oversight rather than complement it (TechWeez). On the harassment offense, the court found "likely to cause" too indeterminate to give citizens fair notice of what speech is criminal — a textbook void-for-vagueness problem that invites arbitrary, selective enforcement.
Steelmanning the Committee's Case
The government's underlying concern is not manufactured. Kenya, like much of the region, has real problems with platforms hosting child sexual abuse material, terrorist recruitment content, and coordinated fraud — and the ordinary criminal process is slow relative to how fast harmful content spreads. A narrowly drawn emergency-blocking power, exercised under strict evidentiary standards and subject to immediate judicial confirmation, is a legitimate regulatory tool used in various forms across democracies. The state's brief in this case reportedly argued that judicial oversight could be inferred from the Act's broader framework even without being stated in Section 6 itself (allAfrica) — a plausible-sounding argument that simply didn't survive scrutiny once the court looked at what the text actually authorized versus what safeguards it actually contained.
Why the Court Was Right to Draw the Line Here
The steelman fails because the specific design of Section 6(1)(jA) discarded exactly the safeguards that would make an emergency-blocking power legitimate. There was no requirement for NC4 to seek retrospective judicial confirmation within a fixed window, no published standard of proof, and no adversarial process for an affected platform to contest the order before it took effect. That is the difference between a targeted emergency tool and a general censorship power dressed up as one. Kenya's own 2025 legislative history underscores how contested this was from the start: a Kirinyaga court had already issued conservatory orders suspending parts of the Act in October 2025 over a separate constitutional defect — the law's passage without Senate involvement — while civil society groups including the Bloggers Association of Kenya, the Law Society of Kenya, ARTICLE 19 Eastern Africa and the Kenya Union of Journalists joined the petition that produced this month's ruling (Tuko; The Star).
The Regional Signal
This ruling lands at a moment when several African governments are experimenting with administrative content-blocking regimes justified by counterterrorism or child-safety rationales, often with NC4-style committees sitting outside ordinary court review. Kenya's judiciary has now supplied a template other courts and legislatures across the continent can point to: emergency blocking powers are constitutionally survivable only when courts, not committees, hold the final word, and vague criminal speech offenses cannot substitute a subjective "likely to cause harm" standard for a precise definition of prohibited conduct. That is not an anti-security position — it is the proportionate, evidence-based version of the same policy goal the government says it wants.
"The amendment confers upon an administrative body sweeping authority to impose prior restraint, the most severe form of censorship, in the absence of procedural safeguards and evidential thresholds." — Justice Nyaundi Patricia Mande, July 2, 2026
What remains untouched is worth noting too: the court left intact Parliament's separate, court-supervised website-blocking mechanism and rejected the argument that the entire amendment was void for lack of public participation. This was a surgical strike against unchecked administrative censorship and a vague speech crime — not a wholesale rejection of Kenya's cybercrime framework. A pending Supreme Court challenge to surveillance provisions in the original 2018 Cybercrimes Act, brought by journalism and rights groups, suggests this fight over the boundaries of Kenya's digital-security architecture is far from over (TechWeez).