Law / Belize

Data Protection Act 2021, Commissioner, Tribunal, and enforcement

Data Protection Act, 2021 (Act No. 45 of 2021), ss. 68-92

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.

Commencement not set.

An enforcement supervision rule binding public and private bodies.

As of 5 September 2026.

What it requires

  • Comply with an Enforcement Notice, Information Notice, or Special Information Notice the Data Protection Commissioner issues, or answer to the Data Protection Tribunal on appeal.
  • An individual harmed by a contravention of the Act may claim compensation from the data controller or processor responsible.

If you get it wrong

Criminal exposureYes

Private right of actionYes

Criminal exposure note

Failing to comply with an Enforcement Notice, an Information Notice, or a Special Information Notice is an offence carrying a fine of five thousand dollars on summary conviction; making a false statement in purported compliance with an Information Notice carries a fine of twenty thousand dollars (s. 81).

Penalty structure

Section 81(1) sets a fine of five thousand dollars for failing to comply with an Enforcement Notice, an Information Notice, or a Special Information Notice; section 81(2) sets a fine of twenty thousand dollars for making a false statement in purported compliance with an Information Notice. A separate offence at section 92 for unlawfully obtaining personal data carries its own fine of ten thousand dollars.

Rule
Fixed only
As of
5 September 2026
Currency
BZD
Fixed cap
20,000

What it reaches

Obligation class

Governance, Reporting

What this law does

Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.

The Act creates a Data Protection Commissioner, a public officer in the ministry responsible for digital transformation who monitors and enforces the Act and must act independently, and a Data Protection Tribunal to hear appeals from an Enforcement, Information, or Special Information Notice the Commissioner issues, with a further appeal on a point of law to the Supreme Court.

Section 91 entitles an individual who suffers damage or distress from a controller's or processor's contravention of the Act to compensation, subject to a defence that the defendant took all reasonably required measures to comply.

Separately, section 92 makes it an offence for a person to knowingly or recklessly obtain, disclose, or procure the disclosure of personal data without the controller's consent, punishable by a fine of ten thousand dollars, subject to defences including that the obtaining was necessary to prevent or detect crime or was in the public interest.

When LexLint raises it

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  • processes_biometrics

Read the law

Official text of the Data Protection Act
2021 (Act No. 45 of 2021), National Assembly of Belize, cited through an Internet Archive capture of the National Assembly's PDF

archived copyRead from a public archive copy, not the publisher directly. The publisher does not serve this page to automated readers, so a direct fetch was not an option here; how we access sources. Archived 2024. Publisher's page: https://www.nationalassembly.gov.bz/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Act-No-45-of-2021-Data-Protection-Act.pdf

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