By Cllr. Garrison Yealue (former representative, Nimba County)
A Dispatch from Mt. Yoohn, Nimba County, where my grandfather once told me that a law, like a fence, is only honest if it keeps something out as faithfully as it keeps something in.
Of recent, officials of this administration have begun invoking the Cybercrime Act to caution and unsettle voices of the political opposition, sending a plain signal through the citizenry that criticism now carries a price it did not carry before.
Whether or not a single arrest has yet followed, the chilling effect is already at work: a citizen who fears his phone may be searched without a warrant is a citizen who has already begun to censor himself.
This is precisely why citizens and lawyers carry a duty, not a mere interest, to study these laws closely and to tell the public plainly what they permit.
We must ask, openly and without apology, why the ruling Unity Party found the speed to move the Cybercrime Act through both houses and into law in a matter of months, while a companion reform, the Act to establish a Claims Court, through which ordinary Liberians could finally sue their own government for malicious prosecution and illegal arrest, remains unpassed years after it was first proposed.
A government that can legislate with such urgency when the power in question flows toward itself should be able to find the same urgency when the power in question flows toward its citizens.
The Constitution of the Republic of Liberia (1986) is not a suggestion. Article 21(b) commands that no person shall be searched or seized in person or property, for any purpose whatsoever, except upon a warrant lawfully issued on probable cause, sworn under oath, naming specifically the person or place to be searched and the object of the search.
The Constitution permits exactly one exception: a search made while a crime is being committed, or in hot pursuit of someone who just committed one. That command is addressed to the court. It is the judge, not the officer in the field and not the Ministry of Justice, whom our Constitution trusts to weigh probable cause before a citizen’s privacy is invaded.
No ordinary statute may move that trust from the bench to the executive. Our Constitution’s own supremacy clause, Article 2, forecloses it: no law inconsistent with the Constitution shall have any force or effect in this Republic. A statute cannot amend the Constitution by the side door.
The Supreme Court of Liberia has repeatedly reaffirmed this fundamental principle of constitutional supremacy. In In re Invalidation of Section 2.9(e) of the National Elections Law, the Honorable Supreme Court struck down statutory provisions that sought to alter constitutional standards, holding firmly that any law passed by the Legislature that conflicts with a provision of the Constitution is null and void ab initio.
Only the amendment processes the Constitution itself prescribes under Article 91, two thirds vote of both houses followed by a national referendum, may alter what Article 21(b) commands.
Yet this, in substance if not in name, is what Section 28 of the Cybercrime Act attempts. It allows the Ministry of Justice itself to decide that urgency exists, and to search, seize, and hold a citizen’s phone or computer on that decision alone, before any judge has weighed probable cause. A same day report to a judge, who then has twenty four hours to approve or reverse what has already occurred, is not a warrant. It is a courtesy notice arriving after the fact.
Where the Constitution requires the search to wait on the court, Section 28 lets the search run first and lets the court catch up after, by which time a citizen’s most private data has already been read, copied, and possibly shared.
Beyond its direct assault on Article 21(b), Section 28 stands in open violation of the Kamara Abdullah Kamara (KAK) Act of Press Freedom, which decriminalized speech, expression, and media operations in Liberia, as well as the historic Declaration of Table Mountain.
The KAK Act was codified to ensure that journalists and citizens would never again face state coercion, weaponized criminal process, or warrantless surveillance simply for speaking truth to power. By authorizing executive dragnet searches over digital communications, the Cybercrime Act resurrects criminal speech penalties under the guise of cyber safety, directly violating the spirit and text of the KAK Act.
Furthermore, it flouts Liberia’s commitments under the Declaration of Table Mountain, an international pact requiring African governments to abolish penal defamation and repressive press laws that restrict free expression. To enact a statutory framework that allows state agents to rifle through a journalist’s phone under executive fiat is to shred both the KAK Act and the Table Mountain Declaration at once.
I ask my fellow lawyers directly: If the Legislature may, by ordinary statute, relocate the warrant power our Constitution vests exclusively in the judiciary into the hands of the executive, what remains of Article 21(b) at all? A right the government may suspend whenever it labels its own conduct urgent is not a right. It is a permission slip the government writes for itself.
Place this beside the Act of 2022 amending our Criminal Procedure Law, signed to end arbitrary weekend and after-hours arrests and to bring our practice into line with Article 21’s guarantee of due process. That reform moved Liberia toward its Constitution. Its flaw, as I have said elsewhere, is that its own exceptions are wide enough to swallow the protection whole. But its stated purpose was constitutional compliance.
The Cybercrime Act moves the other way. I ask my readers plainly, without needing to prove what sits in any legislator’s private heart, whether it is unreasonable to notice that a statute functionally rewriting a constitutional warrant requirement has arrived at the very moment when the ruling party’s most persistent critics are opposition voices speaking and posting online.
The practical effect is this: Any citizen’s online criticism can now be relabeled a “harmful data message” under Section 19, and the moment it is so labeled, that citizen’s devices may be searched and seized without the warrant our Constitution demands.
And so, the second silence compounds the first. A citizen searched unlawfully under this Act has, today, no dedicated Claims Court through which to sue the state for the wrong done to him. That bill has waited its turn for years, while the Cybercrime Act moved with a speed we rarely see given to legislation that protects the citizen rather than the state. A government may not, in good conscience, arm itself with new powers of search and seizure while leaving its citizens unarmed against the misuse of those same powers.
I do not tell you this has already happened here. But I ask you to look across our borders. In Nigeria, more than two dozen journalists have been prosecuted under that country’s cybercrime law, accused of cyberbullying for reporting on corruption. In Mali, a newspaper director was arrested under the cybercrime law for saying aloud that the cybercrime law was being used to silence the press, and events proved him right within the week.
In Niger, six journalists face charges for sharing a public notice. In Sierra Leone, a reporter was detained over a story about a Member of Parliament’s misused funds. This is the documented pattern of what a warrantless cyber search power becomes in the hands of any government tempted to silence rather than answer its critics.
When a government creates a bad law, it creates a lingering poison in the body politic. Bad law degrades the rule of law into the rule of men; it transforms the constable into an unaccountable tyrant and reduces the free citizen to a timid subject.
A bad law outlasts the political party that birthed it, standing ready to be wielded by tomorrow’s autocrat against today’s lawmakers. It weaponizes the legal system against the very people it was built to protect, instilling fear where there ought to be liberty, and silence where there ought to be dialogue.
The crocodile does not warn the fish before it swallows. It is the fish’s own carelessness in shallow water that feeds it. Let us not be the fish.
I call on my brothers and sisters in the Legislature, and on every Liberian who remembers what it cost us to win the freedom to speak against power, to restore the judicial warrant to the Cybercrime Act’s search and seizure power, and to finally give the Claims Court bill the same urgency once given to laws that expand the state’s reach, so that the same citizens this Act empowers the state to search may also have the power to hold that state to account.
For as the ancient scripture warns us, and as our own national story has proven time and again: Where there is no vision, the people perish.
