A decree written to survive a lawsuit — and struck down anyway
On July 29, 2026, Mozambique's Constitutional Council issued Acórdão n.º 6/CC/2026, annulling 18 provisions of Decree No. 48/2025, the Telecommunications Traffic Control Regulation the Council of Ministers had approved on December 16, 2025. The regulation, published on the National Communications Institute's own site, gave INCM sweeping authority to suspend mobile, internet and broadcast services, install monitoring systems inside operators' networks, and compel carriers to hand over call detail records, IP data, browsing history and subscriber information whenever officials judged there to be an "imminent risk" to public or state security.
The timing was not coincidental. During Mozambique's disputed October–November 2024 elections, mobile operators Movitel, Vodacom and Tmcel throttled and blocked internet access for weeks amid post-vote unrest. The Centre for Democracy and Human Rights (CDD) sued and won: a Maputo City Court ordered the carriers to stop blocking access in December 2024. Rather than accept that defeat, the government spent the following year writing INCM's shutdown authority directly into decree law — the same power a court had just told it not to exercise informally, now formalized as a standing regulatory tool. CDD called this sequence, in its own words, an attempt "to create a legal basis for restricting the exercise of fundamental rights," and asked Mozambique's Ombudsman, Isaque Chande, to refer the decree for constitutional review on January 29, 2026. He did.
What the Council actually decided
It is worth being precise about the ruling's scope, because it is narrower than the celebratory headlines suggest. The Constitutional Council did not hold that internet shutdowns are unconstitutional. It held that Articles 5 and 6 of the decree — the provisions letting INCM order suspensions, demand technical access to operator networks and mandate data retention — amounted to the executive legislating on matters reserved to Mozambique's Parliament, the Assembleia da República. Restrictions on freedom of expression and information (Article 48 of the Constitution) and the privacy and inviolability of communications (Article 68) are fundamental rights; under Mozambique's constitutional "reserve of law," only primary legislation passed by the National Assembly can define their limits. A Council of Ministers decree cannot. That is a separation-of-powers ruling, not a proportionality ruling — and as Developing Telecoms and other outlets covering the decision have noted, Parliament remains free to pass functionally similar shutdown powers tomorrow, provided it does so through a statute rather than a decree.
The steelman the government deserves
Before dismissing Decree 48/2025 as pure overreach, it's worth taking the government's stated rationale seriously: the regulation was framed around genuine threats — cyberattacks, AI-enabled fraud against banking and mobile-money systems, and network abuse that legitimately worries any regulator overseeing critical infrastructure. INCM is a real technical body with a real mandate to keep networks operating, and telecom fraud in Mozambique, as elsewhere in the region, is not hypothetical. A regulator that can act only after a slow-moving parliamentary process, with no interim emergency tool, is a regulator that may struggle against fast-moving technical threats. That is a legitimate design problem, and it doesn't disappear just because this particular decree failed the reserve-of-law test.
Why the court's caution should not read as a green light
But the Southern Africa Litigation Centre's analysis of the regulation points to the deeper flaw: Decree 48/2025 let INCM interrupt services immediately and only sought judicial validation 48 to 72 hours later, inverting the prior-authorization standard that UN Human Rights Council Resolution 47/16 and regional courts — including the ECOWAS Court of Justice's ruling against Togo's 2017 shutdown — treat as the baseline for any restriction on communications this severe. A statute that reproduces that after-the-fact structure, just with a parliamentary stamp on it, would fix the separation-of-powers defect while leaving the actual civil-liberties problem untouched.
The stakes are not abstract. Data compiled by the #KeepItOn coalition shows African governments imposed 28 shutdowns in 2024, up from 14 in 2016, and Top10VPN estimates sub-Saharan Africa lost $1.5 billion to those disruptions that year alone — a cost that falls hardest on the mobile-money systems and small businesses least able to absorb it. The continent's courts are split on how to respond: Kenya's High Court barred shutdowns outright in May 2025, while Uganda ordered a nationwide blackout around its January 2026 election regardless.
Mozambique's Parliament now has a genuine opportunity to do this properly — narrow emergency triggers, mandatory prior judicial authorization except in tightly defined exigent circumstances, hard time limits, and public reporting requirements — rather than simply re-passing INCM's decree powers with a different signature at the bottom. CPJ's Angela Quintal welcomed the ruling as a win for civic space, and it is one. But it is a procedural win. Whether it becomes a substantive one depends entirely on what the National Assembly does next.