ZORZOR, Lofa County, September 9, 2026 — For most of the past decade, Liberian journalists and ordinary citizens have measured their legal freedom to speak against a single law, the Kamara Abdullah Kamara Act of Press Freedom, known across the country simply as the KAK Act. That 2019 law removed the threat of criminal prosecution for criticizing the President, for sedition, and for what the old Penal Law called criminal malevolence. A second law now stands beside it. The Cybercrime Act, passed by the Legislature in 2025, was written mainly to fight hacking, fraud, and online abuse. Several of its provisions also touch on expression, and understanding how requires separating two questions that keep getting merged in public debate: what the KAK Act actually did, and what the Cybercrime Act actually does.
By James Papy Kwabo, BA, MPA, contributing writer
The two laws are often described in the same breath, as though the newer one quietly canceled the older one. That description does not hold up under examination.
The KAK Act amended Chapter 11 of the Penal Law by striking three specific criminal offenses. It did not, and could not, create a general right to say anything online or off it. The Cybercrime Act, for its part, grew out of an earlier Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications draft developed with reference to international instruments such as the Council of Europe’s Budapest Convention and the ECOWAS regional cybersecurity framework, and it does not restore the sections the KAK Act removed. The real question is narrower and more useful, whether particular Cybercrime Act provisions could, depending on wording and enforcement, restrict expression that Liberia’s Constitution and its regional and international commitments still protect.
What the Constitution Actually Promises
Article 15 of the 1986 Constitution is the floor beneath every statute discussed here. Article 15(a) gives every person the right to freedom of expression and says the government may not curtail that right except during a declared emergency, while making clear the right carries responsibility for its abuse. Article 15(b) spells out the scope, the right to hold opinions without interference, freedom of speech and of the press, academic freedom, and the right to remain silent. Article 15(c) adds that the public has a right to be informed about the conduct of its own government. Article 15(e) is the provision that matters most for criminal law, because it states that freedom of expression may be limited only through judicial action, and only in cases involving defamation, invasion of privacy or publicity, or narrow commercial matters such as false advertising and copyright infringement. Sedition, insult to officials, and false news are conspicuously absent from that list.
None of this means Article 15 makes every criminal law untouchable if it happens to involve speech. It means restrictions on expression have to clear a specific constitutional gate, judicial process, tied to one of a short list of legitimate grounds. That is the benchmark against which the KAK Act, the Cybercrime Act, and the pending Flomo amendment all have to be measured, not whether they mention speech at all, but whether they fit within what Article 15(e) allows.
The KAK Act, a Law Built to Subtract
President George Weah submitted the bill that became the KAK Act to the Legislature in May 2018, telling lawmakers the Penal Law’s speech offenses were out of step with Article 15. The House of Representatives approved it on July 3, 2018, the Senate concurred on February 7, 2019, and the Act became law shortly after, named for the late Kamara Abdullah Kamara, a former president of the Press Union of Liberia who had pushed for the same reform without success before his death. Its effect was surgical. It repealed Section 11.11 of the Penal Law, criminal libel against the President, Section 11.12, sedition, and Section 11.14, criminal malevolence. Liberians who felt wronged by something said or published about them kept, and still keep, the option of a civil defamation suit. What they lost was the possibility of criminal prosecution and imprisonment under those repealed provisions.
Liberia’s move fit a broader continental pattern. The Committee to Protect Journalists has tracked a similar wave of criminal-defamation repeals across Ghana, Zimbabwe, The Gambia, Lesotho, Sierra Leone, the Seychelles, South Africa, and Malawi over roughly the past two decades. Liberia’s own reform traces its political origin to the Declaration of Table Mountain, a 2007 statement by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers calling on African governments to abolish criminal defamation and insult laws. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf endorsed the declaration on Liberia’s behalf in Monrovia on July 21, 2012, becoming only the second sitting African head of state, after Niger’s Mahamadou Issoufou, to do so. The declaration is a policy commitment, not a Liberian statute, and it carried no legal force of its own. What it did was set the political groundwork that Weah’s government drew on seven years later.
A Bill That Would Reopen the Question
That settlement is now being tested from a different direction. In March 2026, Representative Nyahn G. Flomo of Nimba County District Two introduced the Protection from Gender-Based Online Abuse Amendment Act of 2026, which would amend the KAK Act to criminalize posting or transmitting insulting, obscene, or harassing language online, with penalties of up to two years in prison and fines ranging from L$50,000 to L$500,000. Flomo has framed the bill as protection for women and girls facing a documented rise in gender-targeted online harassment, and has argued it rests on the same Article 15 that recognizes speech carries responsibility, not a rejection of it. The House referred the bill to its Joint Committees on Information, Broadcasting, and Judiciary, which were given one week to review the measure and report back. As of this writing, the bill remains before those committees, with no confirmed floor vote.
Press Union of Liberia President Julius Kanubah testified against the measure at a legislative hearing in March 2026, arguing that reopening the door to criminal penalties for insulting or offensive speech, however well intentioned, would let the same vague standards reach journalists and government critics, not only the harassment the bill is meant to address. The Association of Liberian Journalists in the Americas and former PUL president Peter Quaqua have separately criticized the proposal on similar grounds. None of this means the bill is dead or that it will pass in its current form. It means the debate the KAK Act was meant to settle in 2019 is, for the moment, open again, and its outcome will matter more for Liberian speech than anything in the Cybercrime Act.
Why the Cybercrime Act Exists, and What the Printed Act Shows
The Cybercrime Act’s roots go back to a Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications draft aligned with the Budapest Convention and ECOWAS’s regional cybersecurity framework. The Senate passed the bill, with amendments, on November 4, 2025. The official printed version of the Cybercrime Act of 2025 used for this article is marked ‘APPROVED: JULY 3, 2026’ and ‘PRINTED: JULY 24, 2026.’ That printed Act, rather than the earlier ministry draft, is the text against which its provisions should be described here. The Act establishes offences covering unauthorized access, interception, modification of computer data, system interference, misuse of devices, computer-related forgery and fraud, identity theft, child sexual exploitation material and related conduct, cyberstalking, racist and xenophobic offences, incitement to property damage or violence, harmful data messages, and non-consensual distribution of intimate images.
The Act’s exact provisions also make the relationship with free expression more precise. The sections that come closest to speech are Sections 15, 17, 18, 19 and 20, while Section 21 establishes a court-order mechanism for certain of those offences and Section 29 governs interception of electronic communications. What follows therefore relies on the approved and printed Cybercrime Act of 2025, rather than on the earlier draft text from the legislative process.
The Provisions That Touch Expression
Most of the Act addresses conduct that is not principally about expression. It criminalizes conduct such as unauthorized computer access, unlawful interception, computer-data modification, system interference, misuse of devices, computer-related forgery and fraud, identity theft, and child sexual exploitation material. Five provisions reach closer to speech or expression: Sections 15, 17, 18, 19 and 20.
Section 15, titled Cyberstalking, criminalizes transmitting or causing the transmission of computer data with intent to bully, threaten or harass another person where the communication places that person in fear of death, violence or personal bodily injury. It also covers computer data containing a threat to kidnap a person, a threat to injure another person, or a demand or request for ransom made with intent to extort. The penalty is imprisonment for not more than three years or a fine of twice the gain realized, with imprisonment without a fine where the crime produced no gain. The provision is therefore materially narrower than a prohibition on ordinary online insults: it is tied to specified threats, harassment accompanied by fear of death, violence or bodily injury, or specified extortion-related conduct.
Section 17, on racist and xenophobic offences, criminalizes making racist or xenophobic material available to the public through a computer system or network; threatening, through a computer system or network, persons or groups because of race, color, descent, national or ethnic origin, or religion when used as a pretext for those factors; publicly insulting persons or groups on those grounds; and making available material that denies, approves or justifies genocide or crimes against humanity as defined under the Rome Statute. The offence carries imprisonment for a term of not less than five years or a fine of twice the gain realized; where there is no gain, the punishment is imprisonment without a fine. Unlike Section 15’s cyberstalking offence, the public-insult branch of Section 17 does not require a threat of violence; its trigger is the discriminatory basis specified in the provision.
Section 18 criminalizes making available, transmitting or distributing by computer system a data message to a specific person, group or the general public with the intention to incite the causing of damage to property or violence against a person or group. It carries imprisonment for not more than one year or a fine of twice the gain realized, with imprisonment without a fine where the crime produced no gain. This is a conventional incitement formulation focused on intended property damage or violence, rather than a general prohibition on offensive speech.
Section 19, titled Distribution of harmful data message(s), is the provision that most closely resembles the speech offences the KAK Act removed. It makes it an offence to unlawfully and intentionally make available, transmit or distribute by computer system a data message that is harmful. The Act defines a harmful data message to include one that threatens a person with property damage or violence, threatens a group with property damage or violence against the group or an identified person associated with it, or intimidates, encourages or harasses a person to harm himself or herself or another person. The broadest branch, Section 19(2)(d), covers a message that is inherently false in nature and aimed at causing mental, psychological, physical or economic harm to a specific person or group, where a reasonable person possessing the same information and considering all the circumstances would regard the message as harmful. The penalty under Section 19 is imprisonment for not more than three years or a fine of twice the gain realized, with imprisonment without a fine where the crime produced no gain. The falsity-and-harm branch therefore contains elements that distinguish it from a bare false-news or insult offence, while leaving important interpretive questions about what is ‘inherently false,’ how the reasonable-person standard will operate, and how political claims, satire or rhetorical exaggeration will be treated in enforcement.
Section 20 criminalizes the unlawful and intentional making available, transmission or distribution through a computer system of an intimate image of an identifiable person when the distributor knows that the person depicted did not consent to the making available, broadcasting or distribution. The penalty is imprisonment for not more than three years or a fine of twice the gain realized, with imprisonment without a fine where the crime produced no gain. This provision belongs in the survey because it directly concerns online expression and personal harm, but it is analytically different from political or journalistic speech: it targets the non-consensual distribution of intimate images.
Court Orders, Not Administrative Takedowns, but Narrower Than Advertised
Section 21 establishes the Act’s specific court-order mechanism for Sections 18, 19 and 20. A complainant who lays a charge with the Liberia National Police alleging that an offence under one of those sections has been committed may, on an ex parte basis, apply to a court of competent jurisdiction pending finalization of the criminal proceedings. The court may prohibit further making available, broadcasting or distributing the relevant data message, or order an electronic communications service provider or the person controlling a computer system to remove or disable access to it. The court must be satisfied that there is prima facie evidence that the data message constitutes an offence under Sections 18, 19 or 20 before issuing the order. The order takes effect when issued and brought to the relevant person’s or service provider’s attention, and the affected person or service provider may, within ten days after service, apply to the court to set the order aside or amend it. This is therefore a court-based, complainant-initiated mechanism tied specifically to Sections 18, 19 and 20; it is not a general administrative takedown power covering every offence in the Act.
The Act also assigns institutional responsibilities that matter when considering safeguards. Section 32 provides that the Attorney-General of the Republic shall prosecute offences under the Act subject to the 1986 Constitution. Section 37(2) assigns the Minister of Justice and Attorney General responsibility as Co-Minister for effective implementation and administration. It also requires attention to conformity with international standards and African Union conventions on cybersecurity, international cooperation and effective prosecution. Those provisions are statutory responsibilities, not guarantees about how every future prosecution will be handled.
Interception and Its Uncertain Reach
Section 29 governs interception of electronic communications. Where a criminal investigation or proceeding could not be carried out otherwise, a judge may, on a reasoned and written request of the Minister, order interception against a person for whom there are grounds for suspicion of an offence punishable by imprisonment of not more than five years, or against a person connected to that suspected offender in the circumstances specified by the section. In urgent circumstances where delay would seriously compromise an investigation or proceeding, the Minister may issue a written and reasoned interception order himself, but must deliver it, with the time and reasons, to a judge within eight hours for an immediate legality determination. An interception order must state the available data on the person, the facts establishing its necessity and its duration. Interception may last up to ninety days and may be extended by another ninety days for important reasons. Service providers may be required to collect or record specified communications, while unrelated information obtained through the interception must be deleted immediately; when the order expires, the judge must inform the person against whom the interception was applied of the order, its purpose and time frame. On the face of Section 29, the five-year threshold potentially reaches offences carrying a maximum sentence of five years or less, including Sections 15, 18, 19 and 20. Section 17 presents a different drafting question because its stated penalty is a minimum of five years and the printed text does not state a maximum. That distinction should be treated as a question for judicial interpretation or legislative clarification, not as a settled conclusion.
A Regional Benchmark, and Its Limits
The clearest regional comparison for Liberia’s harmful-data-message and cyberstalking provisions comes from Nigeria. On March 25, 2022, the ECOWAS Court of Justice ruled, in a case brought by the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project, that Section 24 of Nigeria’s 2015 Cybercrimes Act was incompatible with Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and ordered Nigeria to amend or repeal it. The court found Nigerian authorities had used the provision, which criminalized sending an offensive, insulting, or annoying message by computer, to detain and prosecute activists, journalists, and ordinary social media users. Nigeria subsequently amended Section 24 in 2024, narrowing and restructuring the provision. SERAP later challenged the amended section before the ECOWAS Court, arguing that it remained vague and capable of chilling legitimate speech; the Court ultimately dismissed that later challenge for lack of sufficient evidence.
The comparison is instructive, not conclusive. Nigeria’s invalidated language criminalized speech simply for being offensive, insulting, or annoying, with no requirement of falsity, threat, or intent to harm. Liberia’s cyberstalking provision, by contrast, requires an actual fear of death, violence, or bodily injury, and its harmful-data-message provision contains a falsity-and-harm branch. Those are meaningfully narrower standards on their face. The 2022 Nigerian ruling does not make Liberia’s Cybercrime Act unlawful by association. It establishes an important regional precedent that a West African cybercrime provision can violate the African Charter and the ICCPR when speech restrictions are vague or turn on subjective reactions such as offense or annoyance. The later ECOWAS proceedings concerning Nigeria’s amended Section 24 do not erase that precedent, but they show that the legal position surrounding the amended provision is more complicated than the 2022 ruling alone suggests.
A Case That Belongs to a Different Law Entirely
Public anger over online speech in Liberia has recently centered on a case that has nothing to do with either statute discussed here. In February 2026, the Supreme Court’s Full Bench found social media commentator Justin Oldpa Yeazehn, widely known as Prophet Key, guilty of criminal contempt over a live broadcast in which he accused the judiciary of corruption and directed vulgar remarks at the Chief Justice’s mother. The Court sentenced him to six months in prison, ordered him to publish an apology in three newspapers for five consecutive days, and required him to sign a bond promising to refrain from similar language toward Liberian citizens or officials. He completed his sentence and was released on August 14, 2026.
The case is real, and it has generated genuine and serious debate about whether contempt power was used proportionately, and about the risk that a broadly worded behavior bond functions as a form of prior restraint on future speech. It is not, however, a prosecution under the KAK Act or the Cybercrime Act. It is a contempt proceeding arising from the Supreme Court’s exercise of its contempt jurisdiction, and it raises a distinct constitutional question about the limits of that authority rather than a question about either statute. Representative Flomo has cited the case as part of the public mood behind his amendment, and commentators have cited it on both sides of that debate, but using it as evidence that the Cybercrime Act is already being deployed against government critics would be inaccurate. As of this writing, I have found no publicly reported prosecution under the Cybercrime Act involving government critics.
The Regional and International Yardstick
Liberia’s obligations extend beyond its own Constitution. Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, ratified by Liberia, protects the right to receive information and to express and disseminate opinions within the law. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights adopted a revised Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information in Africa in 2019, requiring that any restriction on expression be provided by law, serve a legitimate purpose, and be necessary and proportionate, and specifically calling on states to repeal criminal defamation and false-news laws. Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights protects the right to hold opinions and to seek and impart information, and the UN Human Rights Committee’s General Comment No. 34 warns against broad application of laws criminalizing false news or defamation to shield officials from criticism.
None of these instruments prohibits every restriction on expression. What they require, consistently, is that a restriction be clearly defined by law, pursue a legitimate aim, and go no further than necessary to achieve it. Liberia’s Article 15(e), the KAK Act’s narrow repeal, and the Cybercrime Act’s comparatively bounded approach to harmful speech, set against Nigeria’s broader and judicially invalidated language, provide important benchmarks against which the Cybercrime Act’s speech-related provisions can be assessed. Section 19’s ‘inherently false’ and harm language is the clearest remaining point of friction with those standards, and it has not yet been tested before a Liberian court.
The Question Left for the Courts and the Legislature
Liberia does not have to choose between prosecuting genuine digital harm and protecting political speech. The Cybercrime Act addresses genuine forms of digital harm without expressly restoring the criminal speech offences that the KAK Act removed, and the printed Act shows that most of its speech-adjacent offences are tied to identifiable forms of harm, threats, incitement, discriminatory abuse or non-consensual intimate-image distribution. Whether that balance holds depends on how Liberian prosecutors and courts interpret and enforce those provisions, particularly Section 19’s harmful-data-message test, and whether the Legislature revives criminal-insult liability through the Flomo amendment or a version of it. The printed Act settles what the law says; it does not settle every constitutional question that may arise from its application. None of those questions has been conclusively resolved by Liberia’s courts or Legislature as of this writing. Readers who want a final answer will have to watch what Liberian institutions actually do with these laws, not only what the statute says in the abstract.
About the Author
James Papy Kwabo holds a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communications with a minor in Public Administration from the United Methodist University, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude, and a Master’s degree in Public Sector Administration from Cuttington University. He is a Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Lofa County University, where he also teaches public policy and local government administration. He is the Founder of Alternative Youth Radio in Zorzor, Lofa County, Liberia’s first community youth radio station, and a 2019 Mandela Washington Fellow. He was named winner of the 2024 MoMo (MTN) Heroes of Change Award for his work in community media and youth development.
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