The two Congos, long bound by geography, kinship and the slow rhythm of bureaucratic habit, have decided that the legal scaffolding linking their courts can no longer be left to the assumptions of a vanished era. At a working session held in Brazzaville on 21 May, the justice ministers of the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo agreed to overhaul the bilateral judicial cooperation accord that has governed their relations since 1978, a text drafted when neither digital crime nor algorithmic deception existed even as distant hypotheses.
A 1978 Accord Outpaced by Its Own Silences
The candour of the announcement was striking for a domain usually shrouded in procedural caution. “The judicial cooperation accord binding our two countries since 1978 now displays weaknesses. We have committed to updating it,” declared Aimé Ange Wilfrid Bininga, the Congolese minister of justice, framing the exercise less as a repair than as an admission that an instrument can survive long enough to become a liability. An accord conceived in the closing years of the 1970s carries within it the legal grammar of its time: extradition logics, mutual assistance formulas and evidentiary standards calibrated for a world of paper files and physical borders.
The ambition, as set out by both delegations, is to fold into the revised text the requirements of contemporary international and regional law while accounting for the institutional evolutions each state has undergone over nearly five decades. That dual reference, to external obligations and to internal transformation, signals an awareness that bilateral instruments cannot remain frozen while the surrounding legal architecture shifts beneath them.
Cybercrime and Algorithmic Offences Enter the Frame
What gives the Brazzaville meeting its particular weight is the explicit acknowledgement that the criminal landscape has been reshaped by information and communication technologies. The modernised accord is expected to confront forms of wrongdoing that the 1978 drafters could not have anticipated. Guillaume Ngefa, the justice minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was direct on this point, noting that digital offences and crimes connected to artificial intelligence fall entirely outside the existing text.
His remarks situate the reform within a broader, and increasingly urgent, regional preoccupation. As cross-border data flows blur the line between domestic and foreign jurisdiction, two neighbouring states sharing a river and a porous frontier confront a practical question that older treaties cannot answer: how to pursue an offence that originates on one bank, transits servers indifferent to sovereignty, and produces its effects on the other. The reference to artificial intelligence is notable precisely because it pushes the conversation beyond familiar notions of cyber-fraud toward harms whose authorship and intent are themselves contested.
A Technical Path Toward a New Protocol
Rather than commit to a finished text, the ministers chose an incremental and deliberately expert-led route. “We have decided together to establish a technical team which, within one or two months, will propose a new protocol taking into account legal evolution, our international obligations and new communication technologies,” Ngefa explained, sketching a timeline modest enough to be credible. The decision to entrust the drafting to specialists rather than to political principals suggests a recognition that the substance, in matters of digital evidence and machine-mediated crime, will turn on technical precision rather than diplomatic declaration.
The two officials further agreed to constitute a group of experts charged with accelerating the revision, with the possibility of exchanging specialists between Kinshasa and Brazzaville. That provision, easily overlooked, may prove the most consequential: it implies a degree of mutual confidence in each other’s legal and forensic capacities, and an acceptance that competence in these emerging fields is unevenly distributed and best pooled.
The Wider Stakes of Renewed Legal Proximity
Read against the longer arc of relations between the two capitals, the initiative reads as quietly ambitious. Judicial cooperation is among the least theatrical instruments of statecraft, yet it touches directly on questions of impunity, mutual trust and the capacity of neighbouring states to deny criminals the shelter of a frontier. By choosing to modernise rather than merely renew, Brazzaville and Kinshasa are implicitly conceding that the threats they now share, fluid, technological and often borderless, demand a shared and updated vocabulary.
Whether the promised protocol materialises within the announced one-to-two-month horizon remains, for the moment, an open matter. The drafting of treaty language is rarely as swift as its announcement. What the Brazzaville session establishes, at minimum, is a direction: the recognition that a 1978 framework, however serviceable in its day, can no longer carry the weight of twenty-first-century criminality, and that the two Congos intend to write its successor together.
