Liberia

Liberia's first standalone personal-data statute is formally titled An Act for the Collection, Processing, Transmission, Storage, Protection, and Use of Personal Information in Liberia. It addresses the protection of personal data and privacy as government services, financial transactions, communications, and commercial activities move increasingly online. President Joseph Nyuma Boakai submitted the Act to the Legislature as a bill in June 2025.

The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications publicly confirmed on August 21, 2026 that the President had signed the Act into law. The Liberia Internet Governance Forum had already reported the same signing in a statement dated June 25, 2026.

Its own gazetted text, exact date of presidential assent, and statutory commencement date are not available from an official source, so its lawful-basis, data-subject-rights, cross-border-transfer, breach-notification, and enforcement provisions are not described here.

Liberia's Telecommunications Act of 2007 requires a telecommunications service provider to operate its network with due regard for customer privacy, and bars it from collecting, using, maintaining, or disclosing customer information or communications except as permitted or required by law or with the customer's consent. The Act requires a provider to identify the purpose of any collection of customer information at or before collection and bars using it for an undisclosed purpose.

It further requires a provider to protect customer information and communications with security safeguards appropriate to their sensitivity. The Act leaves a government authority's access to otherwise confidential customer information or communications governed separately by its national-security, public-emergency, and traffic-interception provisions.

Liberia's Cybercrime Act of 2025 criminalizes unauthorized access to computer systems, digital fraud, identity theft, illegal interception, and other forms of abuse involving computer systems and electronic data. The Senate notified the House of Representatives of its concurrence in passing the Act, clearing the way for the bill to reach the President for signature.

The Minister of Posts and Telecommunications announced on August 21, 2026 that President Joseph Nyuma Boakai had signed the Act into law. Its own gazetted text, exact date of presidential assent, and statutory commencement date are not available from an official source, so its offense definitions, penalties, and the scope of authorization for a public web page are not described here.

Liberia's Intellectual Property Act of 2016 protects a compilation of data or other material as a copyright work where its selection or arrangement constitutes an intellectual creation, but that protection does not extend to the underlying data or material itself. Liberia has no separate sui generis database right of the European kind.

The Act's private-reproduction exception, which otherwise permits a single copy of a published work for personal use, expressly does not extend to the whole or a substantial part of a database in digital form. The Act contains no text-and-data-mining exception and no AI-training-specific carve-out.

Liberia's Intellectual Property Act of 2016 excludes the news of the day and miscellaneous facts having the character of mere items of press information from copyright protection outright, alongside official legislative, judicial, and administrative texts.

Once a work has been lawfully published, the Act permits a quotation from it, including a quotation from a newspaper article or periodical in the form of a press summary, provided the quotation is compatible with fair practice, does not exceed the extent justified by its purpose, and is accompanied by an indication of source and author.

The Act separately permits a newspaper or periodical to reproduce, broadcast, or otherwise communicate to the public a current-issues article published in another newspaper or periodical, unless the original publisher has expressly reserved that right. It also permits reproducing short excerpts of a work seen or heard in the course of a current event for the purpose of reporting that event.

Liberia 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 law, and no case law on hyperlinking or framed display.