Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso's comprehensive personal-data statute, adopted by the National Assembly on 30 March 2021 and enforced by the Commission de l'informatique et des libertés (CIL).

It requires a lawful basis, ordinarily the data subject's prior consent, for processing personal data, and express consent for sensitive categories (health, biometric, genetic, sexual-life, ethnic, political, religious, trade-union, and criminal-record data), with CIL authorization required before biometric or genetic data is processed in the private sector, before files are interconnected, before a national identification number is processed, or before purely automated profiling is used for predictive purposes.

It gives data subjects rights to information, access (exercised by a parent or legal guardian on a minor's behalf), rectification, erasure, objection, and an explicit right to be forgotten regarding personal data made public about their past private life, and it bars a legal, administrative, or private decision from resting solely on automated processing, including artificial-intelligence-based processing, that evaluates a person's profile or personality, giving the person a right to know and contest its logic.

It prohibits unsolicited direct-marketing communications absent the recipient's prior consent. A cross-border transfer requires the destination to assure an adequate level of protection, ordinarily confirmed by a prior CIL authorization, subject to narrow derogations. The law does not impose a proactive breach-notification duty on a controller.

Enforcement combines administrative sanctions the CIL can pronounce directly, a private right of action letting a data subject seek damages for the harm suffered, and a cross-reference to the Penal Code's information-technology offense provisions for criminal exposure. The law repealed and replaced Burkina Faso's first data-protection statute, Loi n°010-2004/AN.

Burkina Faso's general computer-misuse title, added to the Penal Code by Loi n°025-2018/AN. Article 711-1 punishes intentionally and without right accessing all or part of a computer system, with a heavier penalty where the access results in the suppression, modification, or alteration of the system's data; Article 711-2 separately punishes unauthorized continued presence in a system, on the same escalating structure.

Article 711-3 punishes hindering or falsifying a system's operation; Article 711-4 the unauthorized introduction of data; Article 711-5 the unauthorized interception of non-public data transmissions; Article 711-6 the unauthorized damaging, deletion, alteration, or suppression of data.

Article 711-10 punishes producing, selling, or possessing a device, program, password, or access code intended to commit any of the above offenses, but carves out production, sale, or possession that does not aim to commit an offense, such as authorized testing or protecting a computer system.

Article 711-12 punishes taking a person's digital identity or using their identifying data to disturb them or harm their honor, private life, or property, and Article 711-13 separately punishes intentionally and without right reproducing, extracting, or copying computer data belonging to another. The title does not define "without right" for a public, unauthenticated web page specifically, and no Burkinabe court decision construing Articles 711-1 to 711-13 in that context was located.

Burkina Faso's copyright statute, which repealed and replaced the 1999 literary and artistic property law. Article 10 excludes official legislative, administrative, or judicial texts and their official translations, the news of the day, and mere facts and data from copyright protection outright.

Article 22 lists the private-copy exception's limits and expressly excludes reproducing the whole or a substantial part of a database from it, which means a database is treated as a protected compilation whose substantial reproduction the rights holder can otherwise prevent; there is no separate sui generis database right of the EU kind.

Article 23 lets a person, once a work has been lawfully disclosed and its author and source are clearly credited, make short critical, polemical, pedagogical, scientific, or informational quotations and analyses, compile press reviews, and reproduce or broadcast, even in full and in original or translated form, current political, social, economic, or religious news articles and public speeches for current-events informational purposes.

None of these exceptions is framed as a text-and-data-mining carve-out, and nothing in the Law addresses AI training specifically.

Article 10 excludes official legislative, administrative, or judicial texts and their official translations, the news of the day, and mere facts and data from copyright protection outright: a bare fact, or the news of the day as such, is never a protected work under Burkinabe law, whichever outlet reports it first.

Article 23 separately lets any person, once a work has been lawfully disclosed, and provided the author's name and source are clearly credited, make short critical, polemical, pedagogical, scientific, or informational quotations and analyses, compile press reviews, and reproduce or broadcast, even in full and in original or translated form, current political, social, economic, or religious news articles and public speeches delivered before political, administrative, judicial, or academic assemblies, for current-events informational purposes.

The exception is not capped at a headline-length or short-extract threshold and is not confined to the press industry; whether it reaches a systematic aggregator's reproduction of headlines and snippets, as opposed to a traditional press review or a broadcaster's current-events report, has not been tested in a reported Burkinabe decision.

Burkina Faso has no separate press-publisher neighbouring right, no compelled platform-to-publisher bargaining regime, no recognized hot-news or misappropriation doctrine distinct from ordinary copyright and unfair-competition law, and no located case law on hyperlinking or framed display.