Information, Communications and Media Act of Bhutan 2018, obscene communications depicting children
Information, Communications and Media Act of Bhutan 2018, s.424
A citation is an address, not a summary. The first part names the law; what follows narrows it to the exact section, article or paragraph.
In force since 8 January 2018.
An AI prohibited practices rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 6 September 2026.
What it requires
- Do not create, publish, distribute, transmit, collect, download, advertise, promote, or exchange any text, digital image, or other material depicting a child in an obscene, indecent, or sexually explicit manner; this offence does not require the depicted child to be a real, identifiable person.
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureYes
Criminal exposure note
ICMA s.424 grades this offence a felony of the fourth degree. Under the Penal Code of Bhutan (as amended by the Penal Code (Amendment) Act of Bhutan 2011 and 2021), Part One, Chapter 3 (Sentencing), s.11, a felony of the fourth degree carries imprisonment of a minimum of three years and a maximum of less than five years.
What it reaches
Obligation class
Prohibition
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
Section 424 makes it a felony of the fourth degree for a person to publish, distribute, or transmit an obscene communication or material depicting children engaged in a sexually explicit act, or to create text or digital images, collect, seek, browse, download, advertise, promote, exchange, or distribute material in any form depicting children in an obscene, indecent, or sexually explicit manner, or to record own or another's abuse of a child in a sexually explicit act.
The offence's second limb criminalises creating a digital image or text depicting a child in that manner without requiring that the depicted child be a real, identifiable person, so on the section's own text it reaches a computer-generated or AI-synthesized depiction of a child in the same terms as one derived from a real photograph.
When LexLint raises it
generates_contentcrawls_web
Read the law
official Act text
via a journalist-federation mirror of the government-issued PDF (samsn.ifj.org), since the government's own hosting domains serve live TLS failures