Rethinking cybercrime prosecution in Cameroon

Advancement in cybercrime has ushered several regulatory mutations in Cameroon to meet up with the legal vacuum created by technological advancements. Before the enactment of Cameroon’s 2010 law on cybersecurity and cybercrime, cybercrime was prosecuted largely through the frameworks provided by ordinary penal legislation. This paper argues that despite the adoption of a special legislation on cybercrime, and from the litany of judicial decisions studied, the judiciary continues to apply ordinary penal code offences in determining cybercrime charges. To probe into this legal issue, we adopted the qualitative research method, which is grounded in primary and secondary sources. The qualitative research method was utilised to analyse the various doctrinal sources using the analogical, deductive, inductive methods of reasoning, as well as reasoning by justification. Content analysis was used to study both the primary and secondary sources. Findings indicate from case analysis that despite the enactment of a specialised cybercrime law, the courts continue rely primarily on ordinary law in prosecuting cybercrime rather than specialised cybercrime law. The net effect of this practice being that it undermines legal certainty, fails to account for the speciality of electronic evidence in cybercrime which frequently results in the imposition of less severe sanctions that do not reflect the legislative objectives of the specialised cyber law. To systematically make a case for reform in Cameroon, we recommend inter alia that there is a need for massive sensitization campaign organised by specialised officers of the National Agency for Information and Communication Technologies to educate and train judicial actors (lawyers, investigators, prosecutors, court registrars, bailiffs and judges) on cybercrimes and the specificities applicable thereto.