Unchecked surveillance and censorship threaten every citizen’s privacy and voice. We challenge unlawful monitoring, internet shutdowns, and content suppression, pressing for transparency and judicial oversight of state surveillance powers.
Censorship rarely announces itself
It usually arrives as a circular. In April 2026 the National Broadcasting Commission issued a public notice threatening sanctions for “personal opinions” expressed by journalists. No broadcast was taken off air and no one was arrested, but every editor in the country read it. We rejected the notice and called for its withdrawal.
That is how regulatory intimidation works. It shifts the cost of a difficult question onto the person asking it, and it produces silence that leaves no record. Self-censorship is not an instruction obeyed; it is a calculation quietly made.
Surveillance without oversight
Interception and monitoring powers in Nigeria are exercised with little judicial supervision and almost no public reporting. Citizens are rarely told when they have been monitored, on what authority, or for how long, which makes the safeguards that do exist very difficult to enforce.
Opacity around state investigations is part of the same problem. When the Independent National Electoral Commission commissioned a forensic examination and then declined to release it, we went to court: a finding the public cannot examine is a finding the public cannot rely on, whatever it concluded.
Internet shutdowns
Disrupting connectivity is not a neutral administrative act. It severs access to emergency services, banking, work and family at once, and it falls hardest on people with the fewest alternatives. We treat network disruption as an interference with fundamental rights that requires legal justification, not as a technical decision.
What we press for
- Prior judicial authorisation for interception, and published statistics on its use.
- Withdrawal of regulatory directives that punish opinion rather than conduct.
- Publication of the records, reports and gazetted laws that citizens are expected to rely on.
- A legal test for any shutdown: lawful basis, necessity, proportionality, and a route to challenge it.
If you have been affected by monitoring, takedowns or a network disruption, report a case to us.