Gabon

Ordonnance n°0011/PR/2026 bans outright, whatever their place of creation, four categories of AI-generated content circulated on a social network or digital platform in Gabon: a realistic deepfake depicting an identifiable person in a sexual situation without their express consent, a deepfake of a public or private figure attributing false statements or conduct to them capable of causing serious harm to public order, national security, or personal dignity, a representation of a sexual situation involving a minor by any technical method, and an imitation of a Gabonese state institution's visual or audio identity for disinformation.

Content falling into these categories can be referred immediately to the emergency-relief judge, whose territorial competence is both domestic and extraterritorial and who may order a temporary suspension of an account or content, a targeted de-referencing, publication of a correction, or the forced insertion of an origin marking on the AI-generated content.

An identifiable person depicted without consent in AI-generated content published on a social network or platform separately has a right to report it and have the editor or host remove it within twenty-four hours of the report.

Ordonnance n°0011/PR/2026 requires every social-network or digital-platform editor, within twelve months of the ordinance's publication (by April 2027), to deploy tools that automatically detect AI-generated content published or shared on its service according to technical standards set by other regulations, to affix a visible, clear, and permanent label to any content identified as generated or substantially modified by an AI system, accessible to the user without any further action on their part, and to preserve and hand over to the Haute Autorité de la Communication, within eight days, the origin metadata of AI-generated content that is the subject of a judicial or administrative investigation.

An emergency-relief judge may also order the forced insertion of an origin marking on AI-generated content as a provisional measure.

Loi n°025/2023 wholly modifies and completes loi n°001/2011, setting Gabon's general rules for the collection, processing, and transfer of personal data by any public or private controller. Every controller must conform from the law's publication. A controller must designate a data protection officer where it is a public authority, carries out large-scale systematic monitoring, or processes sensitive or criminal data at scale, and must keep a register of processing activities.

Processing a child's data is lawful on the child's own consent once the child turns eighteen; below that age it needs the express authorization of the holder of parental authority. A search engine, website, platform, or connected application must obtain a parent's or guardian's prior consent before collecting a child's personal data. Profiling a child is prohibited outside a narrow exception the APDPVP authorizes for the child's best interest or a public-interest ground.

An online service aimed at children must build in privacy-protective technical measures and keep advertising and marketing clearly distinct from content. Any transfer of personal data to a foreign state can be suspended by the APDPVP where that state lacks a sufficient level of protection, and the APDPVP lifts the suspension once it finds that level established. Any person has both a non-jurisdictional and a jurisdictional recourse for a breach of their rights under the law.

The APDPVP may impose a fine of 1,000,000 to 100,000,000 FCFA, capped at 98,400,000 FCFA for a first breach and at 300,000,000 FCFA (or 5% of a company's last closed-year turnover up to 196,000,000 FCFA) on repetition, alongside criminal offences referred to the Penal Code and its own penalty for obstructing the APDPVP.

Loi n°027/2023 punishes fraudulently accessing all or part of a computer system, including exceeding an authorized access, with up to ten years' imprisonment and a fine of up to 100,000,000 FCFA or one of these penalties; fraudulently remaining in a system or hindering its operation each carry up to five years and up to 50,000,000 FCFA or either penalty; and fraudulently introducing, altering, deleting, or extracting data, or knowingly using data obtained through any of these offences, each carry up to ten years and up to 100,000,000 FCFA or either penalty.

An offence against a State information system or critical infrastructure, or an offence committed in an organized group, is punished more heavily still: up to twenty-five years' criminal detention and a fine of up to 500,000,000 FCFA. A legal person additionally faces dissolution, a temporary or permanent bar on operating, closure of an establishment, or exclusion from public tenders, where it diverted its purpose to commit the offence.

The law replaced ordonnance n°15/PR/2018 du 23 février 2018 on the same subject, and gave every person and entity it reaches six months from its entry into force to come into compliance.

Loi n°1/87 protects a collection of literary or artistic works, such as an encyclopedia or anthology, as an original work only where the choice or arrangement of its contents constitutes an intellectual creation; the text does not name a database specifically, so an unoriginal, purely factual database or compilation of data is not itself protected against reproduction and Gabon has no separate sui generis database right.

Reproducing a protected work without authorization is illicit and is punished under the Penal Code's provisions on literary and artistic property, with no specific fine amount stated in this law itself.

Ordonnance n°0011/PR/2026 sets Gabon's digital age of majority at sixteen and prohibits creating an account or profile on any online communication service, social network, or digital platform for a minor under that age, with a narrow carve-out for online encyclopedias, educational, cultural, or scientific directories, free and open-source software development and sharing platforms, and pedagogical content consulted at school with a teacher's supervision and the parent's express consent.

The person holding parental authority is liable for what a minor under sixteen does on a social network or platform in their charge, and that person may have data about the minor erased.

Pornographic content is barred to a minor under eighteen, and the Haute Autorité de la Communication publishes and enforces a technical référentiel setting the minimum requirements an age-verification system must meet, entrusting technical audits of those systems to itself or to the Autorité de Régulation des Communications Electroniques et des Postes (ARCEP) or another independent body with proven expertise.

Within twelve months of the ordinance's publication, every social-network or digital-platform editor must deploy an effective technical mechanism to verify a user's age at registration.

The editor must block or suspend posting, sharing, and social-interaction features for an account identified as belonging to a user under sixteen unless parental consent is formally registered, disable by default any feature letting an unidentified person contact a minor's account directly, filter out algorithmic recommendation of AI-generated violent, sexual, or psychologically harmful content to accounts identified as minors, and report quarterly on the number of minor accounts detected, blocked, or removed and the verification methods used.

A user's own false declaration of age does not relieve the platform of this duty of reasonable vigilance. An editor must also acknowledge a cyberbullying report or a report of harmful content involving a minor within twenty-four hours and decide and notify the user within seventy-two hours.

Loi n°1/87 permits, provided the title of the work and the author's name are given, an analysis or short quotation drawn from a work already lawfully made accessible to the public, conforming to fair practice and justified by a scientific, critical, polemical, educational, or informational purpose, expressly including a quotation from a newspaper article or periodical reproduced as part of a press review, in either the original or a translation.

Separately, provided the author's name and source are given and the right of reproduction has not been expressly reserved, the press may reproduce or broadcast for informational purposes a current economic, political, or religious news article published or broadcast in the original or in translation, or a speech delivered before a deliberative assembly, a public court hearing, or a public political meeting or official ceremony.

Reproducing a protected work outside these exceptions is illicit and, for a work made available to the public without authorization, exposes both the person who let it happen on their premises and whoever materially committed the reproduction to civil liability.