La Responsabilité Pénale Face à la Sémantique du Doute: Analyse du Régime Répressif des Commentaires Tendancieux en Ligne au Cameroun

The tendentious comment—defined by its ambiguous, insinuating, or bad-faith nature—occupies a distinct grey area within Cameroonian criminal law. Operating at the crossroads of freedom of expression, as established by the 1990 legislation, and the criminalization of specific cyber-behaviors such as the propagation of false news, hate speech, or defamation, this double-entendre discourse confronts the trial judge with the delicate task of qualifying the criminal intent behind the insinuation. This paper explores the legislative and jurisprudential framework mobilized to apprehend and sanction these complex digital interactions. Furthermore, it examines the contemporary mutations of a criminal liability that, stretching beyond the individual author of the publication, increasingly extends to platform administrators, thereby creating a risk of systemic surveillance and the stifling of civic expression online. The core issue of this study is to determine whether current Cameroonian criminal law serves as a necessary framework for cyber-regulation or if it is subtly drifting toward an instrument for controlling and censoring dissident digital opinion.