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Law / Benin

Digital Code of the Republic of Benin, Livre VI, Article 576 (Unauthorised Image or Voice Montage / Synthetic-Media Prohibition)

Loi n°2017-20 du 20 avril 2018 Livre VI, Article 576 (Atteinte à la représentation de la personne), portant Code du Numérique en République du Bénin

In force.

An AI prohibited practices rule binding public and private bodies.

Obligation class
Prohibition, Consent
Audit expectation
none
Setting the rule reaches
General

What it requires

  • Do not publish on the internet a montage made with a person's words or image without their consent, unless it is evident that it is a montage or this is expressly stated.

These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text.

In the frameworks

NIST AI RMF
  • MAP 3.3Targeted application scope is specified and documented based on the system’s capability, established context, and AI system categorization.
NIST AI 600-1
MIT mitigations Draft
  • 1.5Safety Decision Frameworks
  • 3.3Access Management
FINOS AIGF
ETSI EN 304 223
  • 5.1.2-1Business need and security risks written down and assessed before deciding to build an AI system.
  • 5.1.4-5End-users told which uses of the system are prohibited.

Our reading of where this law's duties sit in each framework. It never says that running a control meets the law. How we read a framework against the law

Identifiers refer to ETSI EN 304 223 V2.1.1 (2025-12), © ETSI 2025, all rights reserved. ETSI owns the standard; no ETSI text (titles or sentences) is reproduced here. The standard is free to download from ETSI.

If you get it wrong

Criminal exposureYes

Criminal exposure note

Art. 576 punishes publishing on the internet, by any means, a montage made with a person's words or image without their consent, unless it is evident that it is a montage or this is expressly stated, by five years' imprisonment and a fine of 25,000,000 CFA francs.

Penalty structure

Art. 576 states a single combination (five years' imprisonment and a fine of 25,000,000 CFA francs) rather than a range; no lesser or aggravated tier is stated for this offense.

Rule
Fixed only
As of
Currency
XOF
Fixed cap
25,000,000

Who enforces it

Enforcement body

Beninese public prosecution and the criminal courts, with the Centre National d'Investigations Numériques (CNIN) as the investigative body that has publicly invoked this provision

Settledness

As of
Open questions
  • Does "le montage réalisé avec les paroles ou l'image d'une personne" (the montage made with a person's words or image) in Article 576 reach an image or a voice generated by a model, as opposed to a montage assembled from a person's recorded words or image?
  • What suffices for "il n'en est pas expressément fait mention" (it is not expressly stated to be a montage) in Article 576: does a label in the post's metadata, an account profile or a platform disclosure count, or must the mention accompany the published montage itself?

What it makes you log

Logging duty

Article 576 punishes publishing an unauthorised image or voice montage on the internet and states no duty to create, keep, or produce a log or record of anything; its only textual carve-out is that the montage be evident as such or expressly labelled, which is a disclosure defence rather than a documentation duty.

Kind
None
As of

What this law does

Drafted with AI

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

Research summary

Legal information, not legal advice. This is LexLint's own research summary of a public legal source, and it creates no attorney-client relationship. For decisions that matter, consult qualified counsel in the relevant jurisdiction. About LexLint

Article 576 of the Digital Code, within Livre VI's cybercriminality title, punishes publishing on the internet, by any means, a montage made with a person's words or image without their consent, by five years' imprisonment and a fine of 25,000,000 CFA francs, cumulatively rather than as alternative penalties.

The prohibition does not reach a montage where it is evident that it is a montage, or where this is expressly stated, which functions as a safe harbor tied to disclosure rather than an affirmative duty to label synthetic content. The provision is not limited to AI-generated media by its own terms: a manually edited composite of a person's words or image falls within it just as a synthetic one does.

The Digital Code states no day of entry into force, and no Journal officiel publication of it and no other source stating the day it came into force has been located.

When LexLint raises it

When your app profile says your app generates audio with AI, generates images with AI or generates video with AI.

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