Depends on the law and the government. Encryption has a pretty good track record in lots of places. The whole Arab spring (and presumably many other political movements) was made possible by technology. Lots of people all over the world use technology to subvert authoritarian restrictions in their countries. Ultimately of course if a government has the means and the will, they can probably break a given encryption scheme, but it's quite asymmetric and in practice only the highest-profile violations are pursued and even then this is mostly concentrated to the wealthiest countries.