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Supreme Court Misread Broadcasting Content Regulation – NMC Boss
The Executive Secretary of the National Media Commission (NMC), George Sarpong, has said Ghana lost the chance to lead global reforms in media regulation when the Supreme Court struck down the Commission’s content regulation framework in 2016.
Speaking at the Africa Media Bureau’s “Broadcasting at the Crossroads” forum in Accra on Friday, September 26, 2025, Mr Sarpong argued that the Court’s decision—which described the framework as censorship—reflected a misunderstanding of its policy and technological orientation.
“Significant numbers of the courts have told us in private that they didn’t understand the policy orientation; they didn’t understand the technology,” he disclosed.
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Mr Sarpong explained that the NMC’s framework was not meant to stifle free expression but to complement existing technical rules under the Electronic Communications Act by introducing behavioural oversight across broadcasting content.
However, with the Court’s ruling, he said, Ghana was left without a clear legal mechanism for content governance, creating a vacuum that has weakened effective regulation.
He pointed out that just months after Ghana’s framework was struck down, Germany passed the “Facebook Law” in 2017, which later influenced the EU’s Digital Services Act, now considered a global benchmark.
“In November 2016 our law was struck down. By June 2017 the Germans had already started talking to us about the philosophy of that law. Today, what Germany did has become the Digital Services Act for the entire EU. In the UK, they have passed a similar piece of legislation called the Online Safety Act,” he said.
Mr Sarpong insisted that Ghana was ahead of its time in developing content regulation but lost momentum due to the court’s misinterpretation.
“The philosophy that was rejected here has become the global standard,” he stressed, urging policymakers to rethink Ghana’s media regulation framework in the digital era.
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