Fully Authoritarian
World’s Population
Population
HRF classifies Togo as a fully authoritarian regime.
Togo transitioned in 2024 from a presidential to a parliamentary republic with a ceremonial Head of State, Jean-Lucien Savi de Tové, and an executive Head of Government, Faure Gnassingbé, with the title of President of the Council of Ministers. Faure has ruled the country since seizing power in a military-backed coup in 2005 following the death in office of his father, Gnassingbé Eyadéma. Togo became an independent nation in April 1960, but the January 1963 assassination of independence leader Sylvanius Olympio in a military coup plunged the country into four years of political instability. In 1967, Gnassingbé Eyadéma seized power in a second military coup, which marked the start of nearly six decades of dynastic rule by his family, extending to date with his son upon Eyadéma’s death in 2005. Despite the formal introduction of multi-party democracy in 1991, the ruling Gnassingbé family exercises absolute control of power under a highly patrimonial regime through constitutional manipulation and repression with the backing of the army, dominated by members of the northern Kabyé ethnic group.
In Togo, elections are a sham, to the point where the real, mainstream political opposition does not have a realistic chance to meaningfully compete and possibly win. The ruling Union for the Republic (UNIR) has totally skewed the electoral playing field in its favor to the extent that elections are frequently boycotted by the opposition. In addition, it has heavily manipulated the constitutional and electoral legal framework and electoral constituencies, taken over electoral oversight, and obstructed independent electoral oversight.
Togolese independent media, political leaders, human rights defenders, civil society organizations, and members of the general public face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime. Since the 1990s, the regime has systematically suppressed waves of mass national pro-democracy protests with arbitrary arrests and detentions and severe lethal violence. Dissenters’ freedom of assembly and association is severely restricted as ambiguous and draconian laws have been passed to criminalize dissent both offline and online.
Togolese institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. Togo’s courts at every jurisdictional level validate the regime’s persecution of political dissidents, condemning activists and opponents of politically-motivated charges restricting the exercise of their fundamental freedoms, and frequently dismisses allegations of human rights violations perpetrated by security forces. The regime is frequently condemned by the Court of Justice of the Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS) for its persecution of regime dissidents. The institutional framework of the regime’s oversight bodies has been further weakened by the 2024 constitutional changes in all branches of government.
Throughout the Gnassingbé clan’s decades-long rule over Togo, elections have been a sham, to the point where the real, mainstream political opposition does not have a realistic chance to meaningfully compete and possibly win. The regime violated constitutional requirements by altering the constitutional and legislative framework and has practiced gerrymandering to benefit the ruling party’s northern electoral base. It has suspended internet access during electoral periods. The country’s electoral management body is staffed with its loyalists, the regime further preventing international and national electoral observers from monitoring Togolese elections.
Gnassingbé and his ruling party, UNIR, have engaged in systematic and significant electoral law manipulation and voting irregularities. These fraudulent practices include illegal alterations to the constitutional and legislative frameworks and gerrymandering intended to benefit the ruling party. In early 2024, the UNIR-dominated National Assembly, whose legislative term had expired in December 2023, voted to adopt constitutional revisions that transformed Togo’s political system. This shift entrusted the President with a ceremonial role while concentrating executive power within the new President of the Council of Ministers, a position notably not subject to term limits. The constitutional vote was additionally conducted in complete violation of the amended 1992 Constitution’s requirement for a referendum on any changes to the president’s term and mode of election. The regime further fraudulently engages in gerrymandering so as to favor UNIR’s northern support base, as it grants the sparsely populated North an equal or superior number of legislative seats to the densely populated South. As such, the UNIR secured a supermajority in the 2024 legislative elections, winning 108 of 113 seats.
The regime has systematically enjoyed significant and unfair campaign advantages. It has done so by triggering internet shutdowns during electoral periods. During the 2020 presidential elections, the regime practiced internet shutdowns and blocked access to a number of messaging applications, restricting the dissemination of content on social media, undermining access to information, and democratic participation in a period of high political tension.
In Togo, independent electoral oversight is seriously undermined by the regime, as it has staffed the country’s electoral management body with regime-aligned individuals and barred international and national election observers. Although the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) is legally required to maintain a balanced membership between appointments by the ruling party and the opposition, only two of its 19 members were from the opposition during the 2020 elections. In 2022, while the UNIR party officially held seven seats, many of the remaining positions were occupied by members of co-opted parties like the Union of Forces for Change (UFC). Moreover, the Ministry of Territorial Administration, Decentralisation and Local Authorities is heavily involved in the CENI’s electoral oversight process, as institutionalized in the country’s Electoral Code. Further entrenching the CENI’s lack of independence was its refusal to accredit the civil society group CNSC-Togo, the international organization National Democratic Institute, and the Roman Catholic Church, a mere days before the 2020 presidential elections.
In Togo, independent media, political leaders, human rights defenders, civil society organizations, and members of the general public face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime. The regime suppresses dissent with arbitrary arrests and detentions, physical intimidation, regulatory censorship, criminal prosecutions, the enforcement of overtly vague laws restricting freedom of expression, assembly, and association, digital censorship, and transnational repression. Togolese security forces have killed protesters, and dissidents have died in detention as a result of torture or inhumane incarceration conditions.
Independent journalists have faced regulatory censorship, arbitrary arrests and detentions, physical intimidation, raids on independent media offices, and criminal prosecutions. While Togo has decriminalized press-related offences since 2004, the regime systematically exploits a loophole in Article 3 of the Press and Communication Code (2004), which excludes social media from the law’s scope of application. It also enforces a series of articles from the Criminal Code, such as Article 140 and 141 on insult and offenses against authorities, Article 290 on criminal defamation, and Article 490 on contempt of public authority. In 2021, Ferdinand Ayité, director of independent media L’Alternative, and its editor-in-chief Isidore Kouwonou, were detained for a month for criticizing government ministers and alleging possible corruption on L’Alternative’s YouTube channel. In 2023, they were forced to flee the country and were sentenced to three years in absentia by the High Court in Lomé under Articles 290 and 490 of the Penal Code. In 2024, the High Authority for Audiovisual and Communication suspended the accreditations of all foreign journalists ahead of the legislative and regional elections, citing serious failings in political reporting about Togo by French media channels Radio France Internationale et France 24. On November 24, 2025, three journalist unions warned of suspected intrusive police incursions in media offices and destruction of material.
Members of the real, main opposition have been repeatedly intimidated and imprisoned, leading some to flee into exile and risk transnational repression. For example, in April 2024, police stormed the headquarters of the Alliance of Democrats for Integral Development (ADDI) party and violently dispersed a press conference to denounce the national assembly’s adoption of the new constitution. The police claimed that organizers of the press conference lacked official authorization. In 2019, following peaceful protests asking for constitutional amendments, three members of the Pan-African National Party (PNP) were detained and sentenced to 24 months of imprisonment for “aggression” and “rebellion” under the country’s overbroad National Security Law (Loi n°2019-009, 2019). In 2020, presidential candidate Agbeyome Kodjo was detained along with fifty members of his political party, the Patriotic Movement for Democracy and Development (MPDD), after contesting the flawed presidential electoral process and results on grounds of “rebellious intent.” He was released shortly after and went into exile. The regime issued an international arrest warrant against him, an example of the regime’s systemic tactic of transnational repression.
Lastly, the regime widely targets other forms of dissent. In June 2025, rapper Aamron was arrested for calling for mass mobilization against Gnassingbé on the ruler’s birthday; he spent a week in a psychiatric hospital before appealing in public and apologizing for his critical lyrics.
The regime has systematically, seriously, and unfairly repressed protests or gatherings by enforcing ambiguous and restrictive laws, curtailing digitally-organized protests with internet and social media shutdowns, and employing brutal suppression tactics that have left demonstrators injured, tortured, or dead. The 2019 amendments made to the Law of May 16, 2011, establishing the conditions for exercising the freedom of peaceful and public assembly (Law of May 16, 2011), impose general and severe restrictions on the location, time, and number of protests, leading to bans on demonstrations of civil society organizations and opposition parties, as well as arrests and convictions. In April 2024, as the regime was orchestrating its constitutional revision devoid of public consultation, political parties and civil society organizations were banned from protesting under vague provisions of the Law of May 16, 2011.
Moreover, according to a UN Fact-Finding Mission, during the 2005 protests following Gnassingbe’s accession to power, regime security forces killed between 400 to 500 protesters who demanded new elections. The regime’s repression of the 2017 to 2018 mass protests was particularly brutal, with approximately 17 civilian deaths at the hands of security forces who fired live ammunition on protesters. In response to unsanctioned mass protests in 2025, regime security forces fired live ammunition and tear gas while torturing, injuring, detaining, and killing protesters and citizens, including minors. For example, on June 6, 2025, the Togolese police’s Anti-Gang Brigade violently dispersed a peaceful protest led by prominent student leader Bertin Bandiangou. The protesters were taken to a police station where they were beaten, variously tortured and humiliated, and coerced into making filmed statements under duress. The SOS-Torture Litigator’s Group in Africa attributed 5 extrajudicial deaths, 21 cases of torture, and 105 arbitrary detentions to regime security forces over the month of June 2025.
The regime has used Internet shutdowns and access restrictions to social media platforms to curtail digital protests. They were first deployed during the 2017 to 2018 demonstrations, which called for constitutional reforms. Despite the practice being condemned by the Court of Justice of the ECOWAS and denounced by United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteurs, the regime enshrined its repression tactic in its National Security Law (Loi n°2019-009), enabling regime officials to restrict and interrupt internet access in the name of the ambiguous “public order.” Since then, internet outages have become a systematic tool in Togo’s arsenal of repression, as seen during the youth-led and social-media-organized June 2025 protests.
To suppress dissent, the regime has systematically killed or forcibly disappeared dissidents. The regime denies healthcare to political opponents and human rights activists in prison to such an extent that many perish in detention. Member of the opposition party National Alliance for Change (ANC) Etienne Yakanou Kodjo, detained in connection with a national political scandal, died in detention after being denied access to healthcare in 2013. In 2020, six people arrested in connection with the Tigre Revolution scandal died after allegedly being tortured by police forces while in detention. During the 2017 to 2018 nationwide protests, Irish-Togolese citizen Abdul Aziz Goma was forcibly disappeared ten days after his arrest, and again during four months in 2020, after providing shelter to a group of young activists participating in the protests in the city’s capital. He remains detained as of December 2025.
Togolese institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. Togolese courts serve to rubber-stamp the regime’s persecution of political dissidents during periods of national social discontent, condemning activists of politically-motivated charges and failing to investigate allegations of human rights violations perpetrated by the regime’s security forces. Constitutional changes have weakened democratic oversight mechanisms from all three branches of government: the President of the Council of Ministers benefits from greater powers to nominate judges and prosecutors, judicial review of legislative activity has been weakened, and the regime’s executive body has been shielded from executive oversight.
Courts have systematically and unfairly failed to check the regime’s attempts to repress criticism and retaliate against those who express open opposition to its most prominent, widely publicized policies. Togolese courts at all jurisdictional levels convict dissidents of unfounded, politically-motivated charges brought by the regime. In January 2019, the Court of First Instance of Lomé condemned pro-democracy activist Foly Satchivi to a four-year prison sentence, including one year suspended under the overbroad Criminal Code charges of “glorification of and incitement to commit crimes and misdemeanors” (Art. 552-1) and “serious disruption of public order” (Art. 495-3). He was convicted of organizing a press conference in 2018 on the topic of the deteriorating socio-political climate in Togo without the appropriate official authorization. In October 2019, the Lomé Court of Appeal extended his sentence to 28 months in prison with 6 months’ suspended. He received a presidential pardon a week later. He remains subjected to regime repression, as he has been held in pre-trial detention since his July 2025 arrest after publishing videos encouraging peaceful protest in the context of the 2025 youth-led nationwide protests.
Togolese judicial institutions frequently and unfairly failed to hold regime officials accountable, as they dismiss well-founded complaints of the use of excessive force by the regime’s security forces against dissidents, favoring the army and police forces’ impunity to such an extent that investigations into the regime’s human rights violations are rarely conducted in Togo. During the 2017 protests for constitutional reforms, demonstrator and shop owner Mélé Sessi was beaten in the street by a dozen police officers, then arrested and briefly detained. The physical damage she suffered from required a subsequent hospitalization. After the Court of First Instance of Lomé refused to examine a first complaint lodged conjointly by Ms. Sessi and the Group of Organizations against Impunity in Togo (CACIT), Ms. Sessi brought the case before the Court of Justice of the ECOWAS, which, in July 2021, condemned the Togolese regime for the torture or inhuman or degrading treatment inflicted on the peaceful protester, the violation of her right to freedom of assembly and her arbitrary and unlawful detention. The Togolese regime was additionally ordered to open an investigation into the security forces’ criminal responsibilities. In 2025, the Togolese regime was condemned twice by the Court of Justice of the ECOWAS for its responsibility in acts constituting inhuman and degrading treatment inflicted on Togolese nationals, acts which were not condemned as such at the national judicial level.
During both Eyadéma and Faure Gnassingbé’s presidencies over Togo, the regime has systematically subjected judicial institutions to reforms that seriously weaken their independence and operational effectiveness. Through constitutional changes, the regime has tightened its direct control over the appointment of judges, and the constitutional design of the Constitutional Court heavily circumscribes its ability to serve as an independent check on the regime. The process to nominate judges in Togo is entirely dependent on the executive’s will. Article 60 of the 2024 Constitution grants the President of the Council of Ministers the power to nominate judges and prosecutors, strengthening the leader’s power compared to the dispositions of the 1992 Constitution. Furthermore, the procedure for the constitutional review of laws is highly restricted under the country’s 1992 and 2024 constitutions, as such challenges can only be initiated prior to a law’s promulgation and are limited to a narrow group of high-ranking officials or a one-fifth minority of the National Assembly. Following the UNIR’s acquisition of a 95.6% supermajority in 2024, the opposition has been effectively barred from exercising its right to constitutional review, thereby shielding the regime’s legislative agenda from judicial oversight.
The regime has systematically subjected legislative institutions to reforms that abolish their independence and their operational effectiveness. The regime has operated a new constitutional framework which consolidates the ruling party’s power in the country’s legislative organ. Indeed, the 2024 constitutional change, while described as a transition from a presidential to a parliamentary system, effectively shields the executive from legislative oversight, as Article 52 of the 2024 Constitution allows the National Assembly to remove the President of the Council of Ministers with the requirement of reaching the high threshold of a three-quarters majority to pass a vote of no-confidence.
HRF classifies Togo as a fully authoritarian regime.
Togo transitioned in 2024 from a presidential to a parliamentary republic with a ceremonial Head of State, Jean-Lucien Savi de Tové, and an executive Head of Government, Faure Gnassingbé, with the title of President of the Council of Ministers. Faure has ruled the country since seizing power in a military-backed coup in 2005 following the death in office of his father, Gnassingbé Eyadéma. Togo became an independent nation in April 1960, but the January 1963 assassination of independence leader Sylvanius Olympio in a military coup plunged the country into four years of political instability. In 1967, Gnassingbé Eyadéma seized power in a second military coup, which marked the start of nearly six decades of dynastic rule by his family, extending to date with his son upon Eyadéma’s death in 2005. Despite the formal introduction of multi-party democracy in 1991, the ruling Gnassingbé family exercises absolute control of power under a highly patrimonial regime through constitutional manipulation and repression with the backing of the army, dominated by members of the northern Kabyé ethnic group.
In Togo, elections are a sham, to the point where the real, mainstream political opposition does not have a realistic chance to meaningfully compete and possibly win. The ruling Union for the Republic (UNIR) has totally skewed the electoral playing field in its favor to the extent that elections are frequently boycotted by the opposition. In addition, it has heavily manipulated the constitutional and electoral legal framework and electoral constituencies, taken over electoral oversight, and obstructed independent electoral oversight.
Togolese independent media, political leaders, human rights defenders, civil society organizations, and members of the general public face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime. Since the 1990s, the regime has systematically suppressed waves of mass national pro-democracy protests with arbitrary arrests and detentions and severe lethal violence. Dissenters’ freedom of assembly and association is severely restricted as ambiguous and draconian laws have been passed to criminalize dissent both offline and online.
Togolese institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. Togo’s courts at every jurisdictional level validate the regime’s persecution of political dissidents, condemning activists and opponents of politically-motivated charges restricting the exercise of their fundamental freedoms, and frequently dismisses allegations of human rights violations perpetrated by security forces. The regime is frequently condemned by the Court of Justice of the Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS) for its persecution of regime dissidents. The institutional framework of the regime’s oversight bodies has been further weakened by the 2024 constitutional changes in all branches of government.
Throughout the Gnassingbé clan’s decades-long rule over Togo, elections have been a sham, to the point where the real, mainstream political opposition does not have a realistic chance to meaningfully compete and possibly win. The regime violated constitutional requirements by altering the constitutional and legislative framework and has practiced gerrymandering to benefit the ruling party’s northern electoral base. It has suspended internet access during electoral periods. The country’s electoral management body is staffed with its loyalists, the regime further preventing international and national electoral observers from monitoring Togolese elections.
Gnassingbé and his ruling party, UNIR, have engaged in systematic and significant electoral law manipulation and voting irregularities. These fraudulent practices include illegal alterations to the constitutional and legislative frameworks and gerrymandering intended to benefit the ruling party. In early 2024, the UNIR-dominated National Assembly, whose legislative term had expired in December 2023, voted to adopt constitutional revisions that transformed Togo’s political system. This shift entrusted the President with a ceremonial role while concentrating executive power within the new President of the Council of Ministers, a position notably not subject to term limits. The constitutional vote was additionally conducted in complete violation of the amended 1992 Constitution’s requirement for a referendum on any changes to the president’s term and mode of election. The regime further fraudulently engages in gerrymandering so as to favor UNIR’s northern support base, as it grants the sparsely populated North an equal or superior number of legislative seats to the densely populated South. As such, the UNIR secured a supermajority in the 2024 legislative elections, winning 108 of 113 seats.
The regime has systematically enjoyed significant and unfair campaign advantages. It has done so by triggering internet shutdowns during electoral periods. During the 2020 presidential elections, the regime practiced internet shutdowns and blocked access to a number of messaging applications, restricting the dissemination of content on social media, undermining access to information, and democratic participation in a period of high political tension.
In Togo, independent electoral oversight is seriously undermined by the regime, as it has staffed the country’s electoral management body with regime-aligned individuals and barred international and national election observers. Although the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) is legally required to maintain a balanced membership between appointments by the ruling party and the opposition, only two of its 19 members were from the opposition during the 2020 elections. In 2022, while the UNIR party officially held seven seats, many of the remaining positions were occupied by members of co-opted parties like the Union of Forces for Change (UFC). Moreover, the Ministry of Territorial Administration, Decentralisation and Local Authorities is heavily involved in the CENI’s electoral oversight process, as institutionalized in the country’s Electoral Code. Further entrenching the CENI’s lack of independence was its refusal to accredit the civil society group CNSC-Togo, the international organization National Democratic Institute, and the Roman Catholic Church, a mere days before the 2020 presidential elections.
In Togo, independent media, political leaders, human rights defenders, civil society organizations, and members of the general public face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime. The regime suppresses dissent with arbitrary arrests and detentions, physical intimidation, regulatory censorship, criminal prosecutions, the enforcement of overtly vague laws restricting freedom of expression, assembly, and association, digital censorship, and transnational repression. Togolese security forces have killed protesters, and dissidents have died in detention as a result of torture or inhumane incarceration conditions.
Independent journalists have faced regulatory censorship, arbitrary arrests and detentions, physical intimidation, raids on independent media offices, and criminal prosecutions. While Togo has decriminalized press-related offences since 2004, the regime systematically exploits a loophole in Article 3 of the Press and Communication Code (2004), which excludes social media from the law’s scope of application. It also enforces a series of articles from the Criminal Code, such as Article 140 and 141 on insult and offenses against authorities, Article 290 on criminal defamation, and Article 490 on contempt of public authority. In 2021, Ferdinand Ayité, director of independent media L’Alternative, and its editor-in-chief Isidore Kouwonou, were detained for a month for criticizing government ministers and alleging possible corruption on L’Alternative’s YouTube channel. In 2023, they were forced to flee the country and were sentenced to three years in absentia by the High Court in Lomé under Articles 290 and 490 of the Penal Code. In 2024, the High Authority for Audiovisual and Communication suspended the accreditations of all foreign journalists ahead of the legislative and regional elections, citing serious failings in political reporting about Togo by French media channels Radio France Internationale et France 24. On November 24, 2025, three journalist unions warned of suspected intrusive police incursions in media offices and destruction of material.
Members of the real, main opposition have been repeatedly intimidated and imprisoned, leading some to flee into exile and risk transnational repression. For example, in April 2024, police stormed the headquarters of the Alliance of Democrats for Integral Development (ADDI) party and violently dispersed a press conference to denounce the national assembly’s adoption of the new constitution. The police claimed that organizers of the press conference lacked official authorization. In 2019, following peaceful protests asking for constitutional amendments, three members of the Pan-African National Party (PNP) were detained and sentenced to 24 months of imprisonment for “aggression” and “rebellion” under the country’s overbroad National Security Law (Loi n°2019-009, 2019). In 2020, presidential candidate Agbeyome Kodjo was detained along with fifty members of his political party, the Patriotic Movement for Democracy and Development (MPDD), after contesting the flawed presidential electoral process and results on grounds of “rebellious intent.” He was released shortly after and went into exile. The regime issued an international arrest warrant against him, an example of the regime’s systemic tactic of transnational repression.
Lastly, the regime widely targets other forms of dissent. In June 2025, rapper Aamron was arrested for calling for mass mobilization against Gnassingbé on the ruler’s birthday; he spent a week in a psychiatric hospital before appealing in public and apologizing for his critical lyrics.
The regime has systematically, seriously, and unfairly repressed protests or gatherings by enforcing ambiguous and restrictive laws, curtailing digitally-organized protests with internet and social media shutdowns, and employing brutal suppression tactics that have left demonstrators injured, tortured, or dead. The 2019 amendments made to the Law of May 16, 2011, establishing the conditions for exercising the freedom of peaceful and public assembly (Law of May 16, 2011), impose general and severe restrictions on the location, time, and number of protests, leading to bans on demonstrations of civil society organizations and opposition parties, as well as arrests and convictions. In April 2024, as the regime was orchestrating its constitutional revision devoid of public consultation, political parties and civil society organizations were banned from protesting under vague provisions of the Law of May 16, 2011.
Moreover, according to a UN Fact-Finding Mission, during the 2005 protests following Gnassingbe’s accession to power, regime security forces killed between 400 to 500 protesters who demanded new elections. The regime’s repression of the 2017 to 2018 mass protests was particularly brutal, with approximately 17 civilian deaths at the hands of security forces who fired live ammunition on protesters. In response to unsanctioned mass protests in 2025, regime security forces fired live ammunition and tear gas while torturing, injuring, detaining, and killing protesters and citizens, including minors. For example, on June 6, 2025, the Togolese police’s Anti-Gang Brigade violently dispersed a peaceful protest led by prominent student leader Bertin Bandiangou. The protesters were taken to a police station where they were beaten, variously tortured and humiliated, and coerced into making filmed statements under duress. The SOS-Torture Litigator’s Group in Africa attributed 5 extrajudicial deaths, 21 cases of torture, and 105 arbitrary detentions to regime security forces over the month of June 2025.
The regime has used Internet shutdowns and access restrictions to social media platforms to curtail digital protests. They were first deployed during the 2017 to 2018 demonstrations, which called for constitutional reforms. Despite the practice being condemned by the Court of Justice of the ECOWAS and denounced by United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteurs, the regime enshrined its repression tactic in its National Security Law (Loi n°2019-009), enabling regime officials to restrict and interrupt internet access in the name of the ambiguous “public order.” Since then, internet outages have become a systematic tool in Togo’s arsenal of repression, as seen during the youth-led and social-media-organized June 2025 protests.
To suppress dissent, the regime has systematically killed or forcibly disappeared dissidents. The regime denies healthcare to political opponents and human rights activists in prison to such an extent that many perish in detention. Member of the opposition party National Alliance for Change (ANC) Etienne Yakanou Kodjo, detained in connection with a national political scandal, died in detention after being denied access to healthcare in 2013. In 2020, six people arrested in connection with the Tigre Revolution scandal died after allegedly being tortured by police forces while in detention. During the 2017 to 2018 nationwide protests, Irish-Togolese citizen Abdul Aziz Goma was forcibly disappeared ten days after his arrest, and again during four months in 2020, after providing shelter to a group of young activists participating in the protests in the city’s capital. He remains detained as of December 2025.
Togolese institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. Togolese courts serve to rubber-stamp the regime’s persecution of political dissidents during periods of national social discontent, condemning activists of politically-motivated charges and failing to investigate allegations of human rights violations perpetrated by the regime’s security forces. Constitutional changes have weakened democratic oversight mechanisms from all three branches of government: the President of the Council of Ministers benefits from greater powers to nominate judges and prosecutors, judicial review of legislative activity has been weakened, and the regime’s executive body has been shielded from executive oversight.
Courts have systematically and unfairly failed to check the regime’s attempts to repress criticism and retaliate against those who express open opposition to its most prominent, widely publicized policies. Togolese courts at all jurisdictional levels convict dissidents of unfounded, politically-motivated charges brought by the regime. In January 2019, the Court of First Instance of Lomé condemned pro-democracy activist Foly Satchivi to a four-year prison sentence, including one year suspended under the overbroad Criminal Code charges of “glorification of and incitement to commit crimes and misdemeanors” (Art. 552-1) and “serious disruption of public order” (Art. 495-3). He was convicted of organizing a press conference in 2018 on the topic of the deteriorating socio-political climate in Togo without the appropriate official authorization. In October 2019, the Lomé Court of Appeal extended his sentence to 28 months in prison with 6 months’ suspended. He received a presidential pardon a week later. He remains subjected to regime repression, as he has been held in pre-trial detention since his July 2025 arrest after publishing videos encouraging peaceful protest in the context of the 2025 youth-led nationwide protests.
Togolese judicial institutions frequently and unfairly failed to hold regime officials accountable, as they dismiss well-founded complaints of the use of excessive force by the regime’s security forces against dissidents, favoring the army and police forces’ impunity to such an extent that investigations into the regime’s human rights violations are rarely conducted in Togo. During the 2017 protests for constitutional reforms, demonstrator and shop owner Mélé Sessi was beaten in the street by a dozen police officers, then arrested and briefly detained. The physical damage she suffered from required a subsequent hospitalization. After the Court of First Instance of Lomé refused to examine a first complaint lodged conjointly by Ms. Sessi and the Group of Organizations against Impunity in Togo (CACIT), Ms. Sessi brought the case before the Court of Justice of the ECOWAS, which, in July 2021, condemned the Togolese regime for the torture or inhuman or degrading treatment inflicted on the peaceful protester, the violation of her right to freedom of assembly and her arbitrary and unlawful detention. The Togolese regime was additionally ordered to open an investigation into the security forces’ criminal responsibilities. In 2025, the Togolese regime was condemned twice by the Court of Justice of the ECOWAS for its responsibility in acts constituting inhuman and degrading treatment inflicted on Togolese nationals, acts which were not condemned as such at the national judicial level.
During both Eyadéma and Faure Gnassingbé’s presidencies over Togo, the regime has systematically subjected judicial institutions to reforms that seriously weaken their independence and operational effectiveness. Through constitutional changes, the regime has tightened its direct control over the appointment of judges, and the constitutional design of the Constitutional Court heavily circumscribes its ability to serve as an independent check on the regime. The process to nominate judges in Togo is entirely dependent on the executive’s will. Article 60 of the 2024 Constitution grants the President of the Council of Ministers the power to nominate judges and prosecutors, strengthening the leader’s power compared to the dispositions of the 1992 Constitution. Furthermore, the procedure for the constitutional review of laws is highly restricted under the country’s 1992 and 2024 constitutions, as such challenges can only be initiated prior to a law’s promulgation and are limited to a narrow group of high-ranking officials or a one-fifth minority of the National Assembly. Following the UNIR’s acquisition of a 95.6% supermajority in 2024, the opposition has been effectively barred from exercising its right to constitutional review, thereby shielding the regime’s legislative agenda from judicial oversight.
The regime has systematically subjected legislative institutions to reforms that abolish their independence and their operational effectiveness. The regime has operated a new constitutional framework which consolidates the ruling party’s power in the country’s legislative organ. Indeed, the 2024 constitutional change, while described as a transition from a presidential to a parliamentary system, effectively shields the executive from legislative oversight, as Article 52 of the 2024 Constitution allows the National Assembly to remove the President of the Council of Ministers with the requirement of reaching the high threshold of a three-quarters majority to pass a vote of no-confidence.
