Afghanistan

Afghanistan has no comprehensive personal-data-protection law, before or after the 2021 change of government.

Under the pre-2021, internationally recognized government, the 2004 Constitution supplied general communications privacy (Art. 37) and home inviolability (Art. 38) rights, confirmed at primary source and authored here as a bare constitutional-rights instrument, the same shape as Timor-Leste's and Palestine's constitutional privacy provisions elsewhere: it creates no lawful-basis regime, data-subject rights, or supervisory structure.

The 2014/2018 Access to Information Law separately contained a privacy exemption (a ground for withholding disclosed information, not a private-sector processing duty), confirmed at primary source but not authored as an instrument, since an exemption from disclosure is not itself a processing duty. The 2017 Penal Code's cybercrime chapter (Part Twelve, arts. 851-859) is catalogued under the scraping topic.

A significant recent development: on 4 and 7 January 2026 the Taliban administration promulgated a new Criminal Procedure Code and "Penal Principles of Taliban Courts" (119 articles), effective immediately with no public consultation, which multiple independent outlets describe as replacing the prior penal code and further undermining the 2004 Constitution's operative status.

That framework's text is unpublished, so its treatment of personal data is unknown, and no published instrument repeals or supersedes Articles 37 or 38, which is why the constitutional instrument above stays coded in effect.

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

The Penal Code of Afghanistan (2017), Part Twelve, Chapter One, Article 852 punishes accessing a computer, program, or data of a computer system belonging to someone else without authorization, and the article states no requirement that the offender infringe a security measure to gain access; no reported Afghan case construes whether reading a public, unauthenticated page falls within or outside that term, so open-web crawling of a public page is unsettled rather than clearly permitted or clearly prohibited.

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

The Law Supporting the Rights of Authors, Composers, Artists and Researchers (Copyright Law), 2008 protects a broad range of works and lets a natural person reproduce a published work, including all or part of a database, without the author's authorization, but only for that person's own personal use; the Law has no text-and-data-mining exception reaching institutional or commercial use, and its Article 8 exclusion from protection does not separately name facts or the news of the day.

No provision here creates a sui generis database right distinct from the general copyright regime, and Afghanistan has no general personal-data-protection statute reaching a scraper's collection of personal data from a public Afghan webpage. No statute or reported case establishes a scraping-specific unfair-competition, misappropriation, or trespass doctrine, and none assigns legal weight to a robots.txt directive or imposes an AI-training-specific rule.

Multiple independent outlets report that the Taliban administration promulgated a new Criminal Procedure Code and Penal Principles of Taliban Courts in January 2026 said to replace the prior penal architecture; no source locates that framework's text, and no formal repeal of the 2017 Penal Code's cybercrime chapter has been located, so it remains coded in effect on that basis.

Afghanistan has no press-publisher neighbouring right, no mandatory platform-to-publisher bargaining code, no recognized hot-news or misappropriation doctrine distinct from ordinary copyright law, and no located statute or case law addressing hyperlinking or framing liability.

The Law Supporting the Rights of Authors, Composers, Artists and Researchers (Copyright Law), 2008, Article 42 lets the press or other information media publish, without the author's authorization, speeches, lectures, legal proceedings, or similar works already displayed openly to the public, provided the author's name is indicated; the provision does not reach a competitor publisher's own news reporting the way a headline or snippet press-review exception would, and no reported Afghan decision applies it to a systematic news aggregator.

The Copyright Law's Article 8 does not separately exclude facts or the news of the day from protection, unlike some neighbouring statutes, and the Law predates the concept of a machine-readable text-and-data-mining reservation entirely, so no opt-out mechanism of that kind exists.