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Law / Pakistan

Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016, child pornography offence

Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016, s. 22 (Act No. XL of 2016)

archived copyRead 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://pakistancode.gov.pk/pdffiles/administrator6a061efe0ed5bd153fa8b79b8eb4cba7.pdf

In force since .

An AI prohibited practices rule binding public and private bodies.

How the hook was established
express
What makes it apply
Place of effect
Obligation class
Prohibition
Audit expectation
none
Setting the rule reaches
General

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 22 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.

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.

What it makes you log

Logging duty

Section 22(1) is a criminal prohibition naming no logging, record-keeping, or documentation duty. Section 22(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 22(1) addresses. The Act's own traffic-data retention duty (a minimum one-year period, section 32) and its real-time collection and recording power (section 39) sit in different sections this instrument does not cite.

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

Section 22(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 for a term which may extend to fourteen years and may extend up to twenty years, and a fine of not less than one million rupees.

The Criminal Laws (Amendment) Act 2023 substituted that penalty in section 22 for imprisonment for a term which may extend to seven years or a fine which may extend to five million rupees, or both. That Act provides that it comes into force at once. Subsection (2) lets an aggrieved person, or a minor's guardian, apply to the Authority for removal, destruction, or blocking of the material. The Act's own commencement clause says that it comes into force at once without naming a day.

Section 5(1) of the General Clauses Act, 1897 provides that a Central Act not expressed to come into operation on any particular day comes into operation on the day on which it receives the assent of the President. The Gazette of Pakistan, Extraordinary, of , which publishes the Act, records that it received the assent of the President on . The Pakistan Code's text of the Act is dated beneath the Act number.

When LexLint raises it

When your app profile says your app generates images with AI, generates video with AI or publishes adult content.

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