Eritrea retains an older criminal code during its legal transition

Eritrea retained and amended older criminal law as its Transitional Penal Code in 1991. That carried forward a system with offences covering unauthorised dealings in narcotic substances and premises made available for drug use. Decades later, the government still identified the transitional code as the country’s working criminal law.

A legal transition kept earlier law in use

The introduction to the 2015 replacement code described the earlier system as legislation imposed more than half a century before. It said the 1991 changes had amended that law while keeping it as the principal penal statute.

The Justice Ministry’s online law collection includes the 1991 transitional criminal-law proclamation. Its separately linked Penal Code download contains the older Ethiopian code of 1957, showing the earlier text behind this legal history.

The later reform project sought to reflect Eritrean customary law as well as newer offences and approaches to punishment.

The older drug provision covered acquisition and supply

The underlying code grouped narcotic substances with drugs and poisons. Its drug provision covered unauthorised production, manufacture, transformation, import, export, transport, acquisition, receipt, storage, offers for sale, distribution and procuring substances for another person.

The published text combined at least three months of imprisonment with a fine. It used a single broad offence covering several stages of handling drugs, from obtaining them to passing them on.

That is the structure of the older published provision. Its list of conduct differs from the separate personal-possession and cultivation offences later written into the 2015 code.

Providing a place for drug use could also be punished

The older text extended the same punishment to someone who knowingly made premises available for another person’s drug use. It expressly included premises offered privately.

More serious punishment was available for organised or professional trafficking. The provision also addressed knowingly supplying substances or premises to specified vulnerable people, including young people, for gain or an improper motive.

For people hosting others, the law therefore reached beyond the person handling the drugs. Knowledge of the use of the premises mattered.

The transitional system outlasted the published replacement

The 2015 reform introduced detailed drug categories and sentencing bands, but made commencement depend on publication in the official gazette. The government confirmed in November 2024 that the new code was not yet enforced.

A 2025 UN Special Rapporteur’s report reached the same conclusion about the new codes. The legal transition begun in 1991 consequently remained part of the account of how criminal law operated in Eritrea.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}