Summary

  • On 19 June 2025, in SC/COM/MOT/000442/2025, the Supreme Court of Mauritius did not convert ICANN’s concern into corporate command over AFRINIC. The court found that ICANN had no standing to enter the matter, while using its own judicial authority to require a public communique.
  • The Receiver and AFRINIC then issued a Final Communique that distinguished Registered Members, Resource Members and Associate Members in an election context. The importance of the statement lay in the interface it exposed: once an election process consumes a membership label, that private label can grant, change or close a practical route into governance.
  • Classification itself is not the problem. A member-based company needs stable records, and corporate membership, resource-service relationships and electoral administration can legitimately require different data. The risk arises when class, good standing, representation authority and ballot-credential state are collapsed into a single unexplained switch.
  • The communique proved that a public explanation was issued; it did not prove every underlying entry, every class-to-right mapping, the correctness of the full electorate or the legitimacy of any later result. The appropriate accountability device is a privacy-preserving category-to-election receipt with a source, version, effective date, consequence, notice, correction route, review decision and eventual handback to ordinary member governance.