PakistanPrevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016, child pornography offence
Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016, s. 19A (Act No. XL of 2016)
A citation is an address, not a summary. The first part names the law; what follows narrows it to the exact section, article or paragraph.
What follows is LexLint's own research summary of this law, not legal advice.
In force.
An AI prohibited practices rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 6 September 2026.
What it requires
- Do not produce, distribute, transmit, or possess a realistic image or video, however generated, that depicts a minor or a person appearing to be a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct; section 19A of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016 reaches a realistic synthetic or AI-generated depiction on the same terms as a photograph of a real child.
What it reaches
How the hook was established
express
What makes it apply
Place of effect
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Section 19A(1) is a criminal prohibition naming no logging, record-keeping, or documentation duty. Section 19A(2) lets an aggrieved person or a minor's guardian apply to the Authority for removal, destruction, or blocking of the material, and separately lets the Authority direct a licensee to secure that information including traffic data; that is a discretionary, complaint-triggered evidentiary preservation power the Authority may exercise against its own licensees after the fact, not a standing record-keeping duty this instrument imposes on the person section 19A(1) addresses. The Act's own traffic-data retention duty (a minimum one-year period, section 29) and its real-time collection and recording power (section 36) sit in different sections this instrument does not cite.
- Kind
- None
- As of
- 22 September 2026
Who checks it
Audit expectation
none
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
Section 19A(1) makes it an offence to intentionally produce, offer, make available, distribute, or transmit through an information system, or procure for oneself or another, or without lawful justification possess, material in an information system that visually depicts a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct, a person appearing to be a minor engaged in such conduct, a realistic image representing a minor engaged in such conduct, or that discloses the identity of the minor.
Clause (c), covering a realistic image representing a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct, is not limited to a photograph of a real child and on its own terms reaches a realistic computer-generated or AI-generated depiction. The offence carries imprisonment up to seven years or a fine up to Rs 5,000,000, or both. Subsection (2) lets an aggrieved person, or a minor's guardian, apply to the Authority for removal, destruction, or blocking of the material.
The retrieved text is the version as passed by the National Assembly, which does not itself carry the President's assent date or Gazette publication date.
When LexLint raises it
generates_contentpublishes_adult_content
Read the law
Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016
text as passed by the National Assembly of Pakistan, archived capture of the National Assembly's own document
archived copy
Read from a public archive copy, not the publisher directly. The publisher does not serve this page to automated readers, so a direct fetch was not an option here; how we access sources. Archived 2024. Publisher's page: https://www.na.gov.pk/uploads/documents/1470910659_707.pdfEvery line above is drawn from the primary source linked here, read on the date shown. This is a research summary, not legal advice.