Is online gambling legal in Eritrea?

Legal overview

Eritrea has no gambling regulator and no licensing system for gambling of any kind that could be identified, online or offline. The main criminal statute is the Penal Code of 2015, which replaced the Transitional Penal Code derived from Ethiopia's 1957 code; an unofficial English translation dated 15 May 2015 is published on Refworld. Its table of contents lists no offence dealing specifically with gambling, betting or lotteries, although the full text of the special part could not be reviewed for this page. No gambling act, lottery law or online gaming regulation was found in any official source.

In practice the law is silent on online casinos rather than expressly prohibiting them. No operator, local or foreign, can obtain an Eritrean licence for online casino games, sports betting, poker or lotteries, and no official list of permitted or blocked gambling sites was found. Any gambling site reachable from Eritrea is therefore offshore and outside Eritrean supervision, with no local body to receive complaints, enforce payouts or check the fairness of games.

Earlier descriptions claiming a complete statutory ban, active blocking of gambling sites and the absence of any reform plans could not be confirmed from primary sources and are not repeated here. No official guidance on the taxation of gambling winnings, a minimum gambling age or gambling advertising was found either. Because information is so scarce, the absence of a specific rule should not be read as permission: other general provisions of Eritrean law may still apply to online gambling, and the position could change without much public notice.

Verification status: this overview is based on secondary sources and has not yet been checked against the official law text or the regulator. Confirm the details with the national authority before relying on them.