Law / Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone

1 of 5 named instruments researched to a stage, across one of the six areas of law we track: 1 in force. As of 5 September 2026.

AI law none researched
Privacy law none researched
Scraping law 1
Cybersecurity law none researched
Age gating law none researched
News aggregation law none researched

in forceenacted but not yet in forceproposedrepealed, withdrawn or blocked

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

Scraping law1 instrument, 1 in force

Research summary (252 words)

Sierra Leone has no scraping-specific statute, so general law governs each dimension separately.

The Cyber Security and Crime Act, 2021 criminalises causing a computer system to perform a function, intentionally and without authorisation, with intent to secure access to a computer system, and defines unauthorised access as either having no entitlement to access at all or exceeding the level of authorisation the person entitled to grant it has consented to, without requiring that a technical security measure be defeated; no reported case has tested whether reading a public, unauthenticated page falls within that definition.

No Sierra Leonean decision addresses the enforceability of a browsewrap or clickwrap terms-of-service against a scraper.

The Copyright Act, 2011 (Act No. 8 of 2011) is Sierra Leone's general copyright statute, but its fair-dealing, quotation, and text-and-data-mining provisions could not be confirmed from primary text: both located electronic copies of the Act (WIPO Lex and a legislative archive mirror) extract as corrupted, unreadable text because of a font-encoding fault in the underlying PDF, so no finding is made on Sierra Leone's copyright or database-right posture toward scraping.

Sierra Leone has no comprehensive data-protection statute, so scraping personal data from a public Sierra Leonean website is not subject to a general lawful-basis or purpose-limitation duty; a Data Protection and Right to Access Information Bill remained pending before Parliament as of April 2026.

No Sierra Leonean statute or reported case establishes a scraping-specific unfair-competition, misappropriation, or trespass doctrine, or assigns legal weight to a robots.txt directive or an AI-training-specific rule.

Computer misuse

Cyber Security and Crime Act, 2021, unauthorised access

Cyber Security and Crime Act, 2021 (Act No. 7 of 2021), s. 33 (Unauthorised Access)official gazetted Act text, Supplement to the Sierra Leone Gazette No. 71 of 25 November 2021, reproduced by SierraLII (Laws.Africa)

In force since 15 November 2021. Binds public and private bodies.

What this law does

Section 33(1) prohibits intentionally and without authorisation causing a computer system to perform a function with intent to secure access to the whole or a part of a computer system or to enable such access to be secured.

Section 33(3) defines unauthorised, for the purposes of this section, by reference to a person who has been authorised to access specific data and, without lawful excuse, causes the system to perform a function other than what was authorised, and section 33(4) confirms that the absence of authority includes a case where general authority exists but a specific type, nature, or method of access does not.

The Act's general interpretation section separately defines unauthorised access as access by a person who is either not entitled to access the computer system, program, or data at all, or who does not have or exceeds the level of authorisation consented to by the person entitled to grant it. Neither definition requires infringing a technical security measure to gain access, though both turn on there being a scope of consented access to exceed.

On conviction, an individual faces a fine of not less than Le 100,000,000 and not more than Le 250,000,000, or imprisonment of not less than 2 years and not exceeding 5 years, or both, and a corporation, partnership, or association faces a fine of not less than Le 500,000,000 and not exceeding Le 1,000,000,000.

What it requires

This page covers the instruments LexLint has researched to a stage. Instruments named in the corpus but not yet researched are counted in the head and are not listed here. Every entry carries its own primary source on its note page. This is a research index, not legal advice.