On Monday 28 September 2026, Media Defence and Access Now held a conversation about what happens after a court rules an internet shutdown unlawful, to mark the International Day for Universal Access to Information.
Governments worldwide use internet shutdowns to silence dissent and control the flow of information. The methods vary. Some impose full nationwide blackouts, others target specific regions or platforms. Often there is no legal basis cited, no public notice, no warning. The justifications offered — national security, public order, preventing misinformation — sit uneasily against documented patterns of shutdowns during elections, protests and periods of political sensitivity.
The consequences are immediate and cascading. Journalists lose the ability to communicate with sources, verify information and publish reporting. Hospitals cannot access patient records or consult specialists remotely. Schools and banks go offline. Supply chains break down. In this disconnection, abuses can occur without documentation, independent verification or public accountability. Disappearances, violence and atrocities happen unseen.
Over the past decade, courts across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America have ruled that internet shutdowns violate fundamental rights. Zimbabwe, India, the ECOWAS region, Sudan, Colombia and the European Court of Human Rights have all issued judgments against shutdowns or website blocking. Implementation of these landmark decisions remains sporadic or entirely absent.
The distance between established legal standards and practice is widening. Many governments continue to restrict internet access in sensitive periods or areas, using increasingly sophisticated methods to do so, and enforcement remains inconsistent across jurisdictions.
What the panel discussed
Shutdowns have become routine administration. Prasanth Sugathan described shutdowns in India as the first response to any law and order situation rather than a measure of last resort, including, in some states, to prevent cheating in examinations. SFLC.IN’s tracker records the consequences in a section called Lost Voices: students who could not register for examinations, elderly people who could not order medicine.
A judgment is not the end. Mojirayo Ogunlana took the first internet shutdown case to the ECOWAS Court, and the judgment in Amnesty International Togo & 7 Others v. Togo was handed down in June 2020. Six years on, the compensation the Court ordered has not been paid and no legislative framework has been introduced.
Litigation works, but rarely on the grounds you might expect. Peter Micek noted that court rulings have stopped shutdowns in places including Zimbabwe, Sudan and Iraq, almost always on procedural grounds, because the wrong official issued the order or a regulator lacked the power it claimed, rather than on substantive findings of disproportionality. Preventing a shutdown is considerably harder than stopping one already underway.
Compliance can be formal rather than real. Emmanuel Vargas Penagos described Colombia’s response to the Constitutional Court’s ruling on the Cali disruption. The government revised the regulation as directed, and the new rule permits security forces to use signal inhibitors while prohibiting their use to limit freedom of expression — a formulation he described as broad and not operative.
Resources shared during the session
Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline — free technical support for journalists, activists and civil society, including advice on staying in contact when networks go down.
#KeepItOn — Access Now’s campaign and coalition, which marked ten years in 2026 and documents shutdowns worldwide.
South Asia Shutdowns tracker — SFLC.IN’s tracker, recording every documented shutdown in India and the legal basis given for each.
Cloudflare Radar — technical measurement of internet disruptions, with the underlying data published openly.
Vodafone report on network shutdowns — a telecommunications operator’s own account of record-level shutdowns and the safeguards it wants placed on government demands.
Our work on shutdowns
Several of the cases discussed in the webinar are ones we have supported before the ECOWAS Court.
Senegal: Media Defence files case before the ECOWAS Court over shutdowns
ECOWAS Court condemns internet shutdown in Guinea
ECOWAS Court and Nigeria’s blocking of Twitter
Our modules on freedom of expression online — free legal resources for lawyers litigating these cases.
Meet the panel
Mojirayo Ogunlana is a Nigerian human rights and digital rights lawyer based in Abuja who litigates against internet shutdowns and online censorship across West Africa. She has represented applicants in landmark regional cases and is deeply engaged with enforcement challenges in the ECOWAS jurisdiction.
Prasanth Sugathan is the Legal Director at the Software Freedom Law Center, India (SFLC.IN), a New Delhi-based legal services organisation. He has more than two decades of experience in the legal profession, and his areas of practice include technology law, intellectual property law, administrative law and constitutional law, as well as domestic litigation strategies and the evolving jurisprudence on digital rights in Asia.
Emmanuel Vargas Penagos is co-founder and co-director of El Veinte in Colombia. He litigated the Cali internet shutdown case, in which the Constitutional Court found that the government’s failure to investigate and inform was itself a violation of freedom of expression and ordered it to report on what happened. It was the first shutdown judgment by a court in Latin America.
Peter Micek is General Counsel and UN Policy Manager at Access Now, based in New York City. He leads the organisation’s legal arm, managing global programming and operations, and brings an international advocacy perspective on enforcement mechanisms and state accountability.
Moderator:
Yuri Marchenko, Senior Legal Officer at Media Defence.
