Law note · Timor-Leste
Constitution of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, Section 38 (Protection of personal data)
What it requires
- Timor-Leste has no personal-data-protection statute; its Constitution grants a citizen a right to access personal data held about them, including a voiceprint or faceprint a service creates, and to demand its purpose, and separately requires consent before processing data on private life, political or philosophical convictions, religious faith, party or trade union membership, or ethnical origin. The Constitution itself does not define personal data or set processing conditions generally, and no implementing statute exists, so an app operating in Timor-Leste faces an access right with no defined scope rather than a comprehensive regime.
When LexLint raises it
processes_biometricsprocesses_voicecrawls_webtrains_modelsdeploys_chatbot
What we found
Section 38 of Timor-Leste's Constitution, read verbatim in full, grants every citizen a right to access personal data about them held in a computer system or manual records and to demand the purpose of that data (38(1)), and prohibits processing data on private life, political or philosophical convictions, religious faith, party or trade union membership, and ethnical origin without the individual's consent (38(3)).
Section 38(2) itself defers the concept of personal data, and the conditions applicable to processing it generally, to a law that Timor-Leste has never enacted, so there is no defined scope, no supervisory authority, and no procedural mechanism behind either right.
No biometric-specific provision exists anywhere in the Constitution, and section 38(3)'s named sensitive categories do not include biometric data, so a voiceprint or faceprint falls only under the undefined general access right, with the sensitive-category consent requirement's reach to it uncertain. Adjacent Section 36 (honour and privacy) and Section 37 (inviolability of home and correspondence) protect related interests but create no personal-data-specific duty.