Skype me? Indeed | Text of Ethiopia’s draft Telecom Law

The world wide web was awash with news reports of alleged ban of VOIP services by Ethiopian in the past week.

One of those was Al-Jazeera’s news brief that stated:

A new law in Ethiopia has criminalized the use of VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) services such as Skype. Users could face up to 15 years of jail time. The law was passed May 24th, but the story wasn’t picked up by international media until recently.

The story was erroneous, however.

To begin with, the said ‘law’ – A Proclamation on Telecom Fraud Offences – is only a draft and only passed the first reading stage of the legislative process to date. This stage is more of procedural and hardly deals with the contents of a draft legislation.

Secondly, the closest thing to a prohibition of Skype in this draft law is found in Article 10 sub-article (3) and (4) that state:

source: http://danielberhane.wordpress.com