Authorities tighten Media and Online Restrictions

GENERAL UPDATE

Ahead of the UN Human Rights Council’s 61st session, a record 129 South Sudanese, regional, and international NGOs called for the renewal of the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan’s (CHRSS) mandate to allow continued investigation into violations of international law. The NGOs emphasised that the CHRSS remains the only mechanism charged with collecting and preserving evidence of such violations to ensure future accountability. They highlighted a continued deterioration in South Sudan’s human rights situation, noting that concerns raised in 2025 have intensified amid persistent violence, including clashes between armed ethnic self-defence groups and parties to the ongoing non-international armed conflict. Violence, incendiary speech, abductions, sexual violence, forced mobilisation, and large-scale displacement continue across Central, Eastern, and Western Equatoria States, Greater Jonglei, Unity, Warrap, Upper Nile, Lakes, Western Bahr el Ghazal, and the administrative regions of Abyei and Pibor. UNMISS has documented a worsening political and security environment, including over 100,000 displaced persons between 29th December 2025 and 9th January 2026, primarily women, children, and older persons. NGOs stressed that, in line with the HRC’s prevention mandate, renewing the CHRSS’s mandate is essential to secure evidence of gross and systematic human rights and humanitarian law violations since 2013 and to ensure its transfer to independent judicial authorities, with all elements of the mandate preserved.

Expression

The suspension of Hot in Juba underscores increasing pressure on independent media and the shrinking of civic space in South Sudan. On 23rd September 2025, the outlet was summoned by the media authority over a “series of complaints,” yet its attempts to engage, including sending a lawyer while the editor-in-chief was abroad, were repeatedly rejected by the authorities. On 6th October, the regulator issued a suspension letter, accusing the outlet of publishing “reckless” and “defamatory” content, ordering the removal of all such statements, and barring staff from their offices. The regulator cited Hot in Juba’s alleged failure to comply with summonses and refusal to provide testimony. The outlet stated it delayed public disclosure for nearly two months in pursuit of dialogue, which ultimately failed, and reported that an official at the media authority threatened to petition the National Communications Authority to block its platforms nationwide.

Separately, in February 2026, President Salva Kiir signed the Cybercrime and Computer Misuse Act into law, formalising a legislative framework that expands government control over online activity in South Sudan. The law, passed by the Transitional National Legislative Assembly in November 2025 with amendments, criminalises a wide range of cyber offences, including unauthorised data transmission, hacking, espionage, cyberterrorism, economic sabotage, creation of fake websites and social media accounts, online impersonation, publication of false information, indecent content, and gender-based harassment. Minor violations carry penalties of up to two years’ imprisonment or fines of up to one million South Sudanese pounds. The Act also transfers oversight of cybercrime to a new national cybercrime department within the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, previously under the National Communication Authority. While the government frames the law as a tool to combat online crimes and harmful content, civil society groups and rights advocates have warned that its broad provisions could be used to suppress freedom of expression and increase state surveillance of digital spaces.