Assessing Ethiopia's Readiness to Combat Computer-focused Crimes: A Legislative Analysis

The rapid digitalisation of Ethiopia‟s telecommunication services has brought not only opportunities but also challenges, not the least an increasing vulnerability to cybercrime attacks. The Ethiopian government started to criminalise computer-focused offences in the 2004 Criminal Code by including a short list of computer crime provisions, partially completed by the 2012 Telecom Fraud Offence Proclamation. A decade later, the 2016 Computer Crime Proclamation significantly amended these offences and their punishments. Yet, the Ethiopian legislator is contemplating a third set of legislation, with the 2019 draft Computer Crime Proclamation. This article critically analyses these three legislative reforms. It contends that the 2016 Computer Crime Proclamation represents a strong positive step towards a proportionate and adapted response to computer-focused crimes. Ethiopia‟s current readiness to tackle cybercrime would be, however, strengthened if it were to further improve the provisions of the 2016 Proclamation. Unfortunately, the 2019 Draft Proclamation is not the way forward. As it stands, it would perpetuate the cycle of revisions without being justified by rapid changes in technological advancement or by the specificities of cybercrimes, such as their scale and transnational dimension. For the reform to be effective and long-lasting, the legislator should simultaneously maintain the 2016 Proclamation, which successfully modernised the law, and remedied its deficiencies. Reform should notably consider the specific features of computer-focused crimes and the best experiences from international and regional standards, notably the Budapest Convention, and the AU Malabo Convention. Such an approach would reinforce Ethiopia‟s adequate criminalisation of computer-focused crimes cognisant of the cybercrime and cybersecurity ecosystem.