Eritrea publishes a new code separating personal drug use from trafficking

Eritrea published a new penal code in 2015 that separated personal drug possession and cultivation from trafficking. Its personal-use provisions offered a fine as an alternative to six to twelve months in prison. The government later confirmed that the code was still awaiting enforcement, leaving the older transitional law as the working criminal code.

Legal reform brought a different drug chapter

Justice Minister Fawzia Hashim described a drafting process involving international criminal-law specialists and an Eritrean law-reform committee. Judges, prosecutors, lawyers, lecturers and police officials contributed through consultations.

The code’s introduction presented the reform as a way to reflect Eritrean customary law and address newer offences, including drug crimes. It sought a system in which punishment matched the seriousness of an offence.

The proposed replacement followed the transitional code retained in 1991, which drew on much older Ethiopian criminal law.

Personal possession and cultivation received their own treatment

The published drug chapter created separate personal-use offences for controlled drugs and controlled plants. It placed possessing or growing a controlled plant for personal use within the lesser offence category, with six to twelve months in prison or a fine.

More serious trafficking and production offences used different sentencing bands. The text defined trafficking broadly enough to include giving or transferring a drug, while saying that buying for one’s own use did not by itself make the buyer a party to trafficking.

The definitions of controlled substances and the quantities separating the bands were assigned to separate regulations. Those rules would determine which substances and amounts fell within each offence.

Publication and legal commencement were separate steps

The opening provisions declared that the new code would replace the Transitional Penal Code. They also specified that it would enter into force on publication in the Gazette of Eritrean Laws.

That distinction mattered to anyone facing a drug charge: the published personal-use tariff depended on the new code becoming operative. Making the book available did not complete the commencement process described in its own text.

The government later identified the older working law

In a November 2024 reply to the UN children’s-rights committee, Eritrea called the transitional code the working law and said that the 2015 code was not yet enforced. In 2025, the UN Special Rapporteur likewise reported that the new codes had not been brought into force.

The older code remained central to that legal history. Its drug provision covered unauthorised production, acquisition, storage and distribution, together with knowingly providing premises for drug use. The delayed replacement left that earlier criminal-law system in place in Eritrea.^[1][2][3][4]