Guinea-Bissau is a member state of the Economic Community of West African StatesThe 3 researched instruments of the Economic Community of West African States are listed on the Economic Community of West African States page, not here. Whether each is in force in Guinea-Bissau is not yet researched. The law of Guinea-Bissau, described on this page below, applies here.
3 of 8 named instruments researched to a stage, across two of the ten areas of law we track: 2 in force and 1 no longer in force. As of .
in forcenot yet in forceblocked by a courtproposedno longer in force
Cybersecurity law1 instrument, 1 in force
Research summary (738 words)
The Autoridade Reguladora Nacional das Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicações (ARN), Guinea-Bissau's telecommunications and ICT regulator, publishes a full site, sitemap, and national- and international-legislation listing, all of which were read in full. Guinea-Bissau's currently effective ICT and telecommunications framework, as ARN's own inventory presents it, carries no operator-facing security-posture duty of the kind this topic tracks.
Lei n.º 5/2010 (Lei de Base das Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação), ARN's own foundational ICT statute, is listed on the regulator's site only as a bare announcement with no attached text, so its own content is not confirmed beyond that listing.
Four 2013 decrees, described in ARN's own 'Diplomas' page, Decreto n.º 21/2013 (passive-infrastructure sharing), Decreto n.º 22/2013 (mobile-subscriber identification and registration), Decreto n.º 14/2013 (traffic-management and anti-fraud technical conditions for network operators), and Decreto n.º 15/2013 (the analogue-to-digital broadcast transition commission), cover licensing, numbering, and market-structure topics rather than a security-programme, vulnerability-disclosure, or incident-reporting duty; none of the four, as ARN itself describes them, reaches this topic.
Two legislative reforms are visibly in motion at ARN, each published as a draft for consultation, the first on and the second on .
A new, still-unnumbered 'Lei de Base' of electronic communications is being implemented through two draft decrees ARN published for consultation on : the draft Regulamento de Oferta de Redes e Serviços das Comunicações Eletrónicas states its own purpose is to guarantee 'a qualidade, segurança e continuidade dos serviços prestados ao público' (the quality, security, and continuity of the services provided to the public), and its own text of the operators' common obligations lists 'obrigações dos operadores em matéria de segurança e integridade previstas nos artigos 66.º, 67.º, 70.º e 73.º da Lei de Base' (operators' obligations regarding security and integrity provided for in Articles 66, 67, 70, and 73 of the Base Law), naming a security-and-integrity duty on a licensed network or service operator that the draft Base Law itself carries; the decree's own preamble and operative articles still use bracketed placeholders for the decree number, the year, and the Base Law's own number, so it is a proposal rather than a text this topic can cite as law.
A companion draft, the Regulamento sobre Fiscalização, Sanções e Resolução de Litígios, published the same day, sets out ARN's supervisory, sanctioning, and dispute-resolution procedure for the same sector but does not itself state a security-posture duty.
Separately, ARN published a Projecto de Lei das Transacções Electrónicas de 2025 for public consultation on ; its own cover page carries the header 'PROJECTO DE LEI DAS TRANSACÇÕES ELECTRÓNICAS DE 2025' over a blank 'Data de Publicação' field, confirming it is a bill rather than an enacted law.
That bill would create a licensing regime, administered by a Competent Authority the Minister for Communications designates from among the agencies under the Ministry of Transport, Telecommunications and Digital Economy, for a 'prestador de serviços de confiança' (trust service provider) offering encryption or authentication services, and its Article 39, headed 'Segurança', would require every licensed trust service provider to 'adoptar medidas técnicas e organizacionais que garantam a implementação de controlos de segurança adequados para prevenir, limitar e gerir os riscos de segurança associados à prestação dos seus serviços' (adopt technical and organizational measures that ensure the implementation of adequate security controls to prevent, limit, and manage the security risks associated with providing its services), and separately would require that provider, whenever it suffers, becomes aware of, or suspects a security breach in its systems or processes, to 'notificar imediatamente a Autoridade Competente' (immediately notify the Competent Authority): a security-control-and-incident-notification duty closely paralleling the EU's trust-service-provider regime under eIDAS.
Guinea-Bissau is a member state of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU/UEMOA), corroborated directly by ARN's own international-legislation page, which lists multiple 'Textos Comunitários UEMOA' community texts (decisions and directives from 2006) as part of Guinea-Bissau's own regulatory framework. Guinea-Bissau's comprehensive personal-data statute, if any, is this jurisdiction's privacy-topic finding and is not restated here.
BCEAO Instruction n°008-05-2015 requires every electronic money issuing solution in the UMOA member states to meet requirements for high availability of the platform, integrity of messages, confidentiality of information, authenticity of transactions and non-repudiation of transactions. Guinea-Bissau is one of the eight member states of the UMOA.
BCEAO Instruction n° 009-06-2015 sets the rules on the information system security arrangements of credit information bureaus, their subsidiaries, branches and representative offices.
Article 7 requires every electronic money issuing solution to meet requirements for high availability of the platform, integrity of messages, confidentiality of information, authenticity of transactions and non-repudiation of transactions. Article 7 requires the issuer to have its compliance with those requirements attested by an external audit at least once every three years.
Article 40 lets the BCEAO sanction a breach of the instruction by an electronic money institution with a warning, a suspension or prohibition of operations, other limits on activity or withdrawal of the licence, and a pecuniary sanction of at most twenty-five percent of the minimum share capital required.
Reuse law2 instruments, 1 in force, 1 no longer in force
Research summary (138 words)
Guinea-Bissau has no domestic copyright statute more recent than the 1972 Copyright Code (Decree-Law No. 46.980), and no evidence was found that this older national law has been amended to address news aggregation.
As an OAPI member state, Guinea-Bissau's operative copyright regime is instead the regional Bangui Agreement, whose Annex VII, in the Act of , takes the place of national law on literary and artistic property as a minimum normative framework and carries a press-quotation exception reaching news reproduction. The 2015 Act replaces the Act of as between the States party to it, and its Annex VII repeals the copyright title of the 1999 Annex VII.
That regime creates no press-publisher neighbouring right, no mandatory bargaining code, and no hot-news or linking-and-framing rule, and no other Guinea-Bissau source states a text-and-data-mining opt-out.
Annex VII Article 6 excludes official legislative, administrative, and judicial texts, the news of the day, and mere facts and data from copyright protection. Article 8 gives an author the exclusive right to exploit a work in any form, including the exclusive right to reproduce it, translate or adapt it, distribute copies to the public, and perform it in public.
Article 15 carves out a free-use exception for informational purposes, on condition that the source and the author's name, where the source gives it, are credited.
Without the author's authorization or any payment, any person may reproduce by print or audiovisual press an economic, political, or religious article published in a newspaper or periodical, or a broadcast work of the same character, where the right of reproduction, broadcasting, or communication to the public has not been expressly reserved.
A work seen or heard in the course of a current event may likewise be reproduced or made accessible to the public, to report the event, to the extent the informational purpose justifies. Political speeches, lectures, addresses, sermons, and courtroom pleadings may be reproduced by print or audiovisual press for information, unless the authors have expressly reserved their rights. Authors alone keep the right to publish collections of such works.
Article 11 separately permits quoting a lawfully published work in another work, with the source and author credited, where the quotation accords with good usage and does not exceed what its purpose justifies. OAPI reports that the Act of entered into force on . Guinea-Bissau's minister in charge of industry handed the instrument of ratification of the revised Bangui Agreement to the Director General of the African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI).
The handover took place at the 60th ordinary session of OAPI's Administrative Council, held in Lomé on . Article 41 provides that instruments of ratification are deposited with the Director General, so Guinea-Bissau became a party to the Act on that day. The Government of Guinea-Bissau is named in the Act's preamble as a signatory.
In the OAPI member states the Agreement and its Annexes take the place of national law on the matters they cover, and Annex VII is a minimum normative framework.
No longer in force.since replaced Replaced by a later law on . The page is kept as a record.
Binds public and private bodies.
What this law does
The Act of replaces the Act of as between the States party to it. Article 86(1) of Annex VII of the 2015 Act repeals Title I of Annex VII of the 1999 Act, the copyright title that carries Article 16 described here. Guinea-Bissau's minister in charge of industry handed the instrument of ratification of the revised Bangui Agreement to the Director General of the African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI).
The handover took place at the 60th ordinary session of OAPI's Administrative Council, held in Lomé on .
Guinea-Bissau is a member state of the African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI), and the Bangui Agreement as revised on stated that it and its annexes apply in their entirety to every State that ratifies or accedes to it, so its Annex VII copyright regime governed literary and artistic property in Guinea-Bissau directly, without need of separate domestic transposition.
Article 16 of Annex VII permits, without the author's consent and without payment, reproducing in the press, broadcasting, or communicating to the public an economic, political, or religious article already published in a newspaper or periodical, provided the source and author are credited, unless the right of reproduction has been expressly reserved; the same article separately permits reporting on current events and reproducing political speeches and public addresses for informational purposes.
Annex VII creates no press-publisher neighbouring right, no compelled platform-to-publisher bargaining regime, no hot-news or misappropriation doctrine distinct from ordinary copyright, and no machine-readable text-and-data-mining opt-out; it also predates any Guinea-Bissau case law testing whether the press exception reaches a systematic aggregator's reproduction of headlines and snippets, as opposed to a traditional press review.
These areas of law were researched here and no instrument was recorded. Each finding says what the research checked, as of the date under it. It describes our search, not a guarantee that no such law exists.
AI law
No AI-specific statute, regulation, or government strategy binding a private developer or deployer has been identified for Guinea-Bissau.
Lei n.º 5/2010 de 27 de Maio (Lei de Base das Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação), the country's foundational digital-sector law, read in full, establishes the national telecommunications regulator and its licensing and Internet-governance functions but contains no provision addressing automated decision-making, synthetic-content disclosure, or AI-system risk.
Secondary sources report a draft national data-protection bill in development to transpose the ECOWAS Supplementary Act on Personal Data Protection, but no official text, bill number or parliamentary stage is on the public record. Any right concerning fully automated decisions with significant effects on a person that such a law carried would attach to personal data rather than to an AI system as such, placing it under the privacy topic's seam rule rather than this one.
As of .
Privacy law
Guinea-Bissau has no comprehensive data-protection statute and no data-protection supervisory authority.
Lei n.º 5/2010 de 27 de Maio (Lei de Base das Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação), read in full, carries no privacy or data-protection chapter: its universal-service article mentions data protection only as a savings clause exempting a published telephone directory from prejudicing privacy, and a separate article sets a confidentiality duty running between telecommunications operators over information exchanged during interconnection negotiations, neither of which regulates a private service's collection or processing of personal data generally.
Guinea-Bissau is a member of the Economic Community of West African States and so falls within the scope of Supplementary Act A/SA.1/01/10 on Personal Data Protection within ECOWAS, adopted , which obliges member states to enact implementing national legislation and establish a national supervisory authority; no Guinea-Bissau statute doing either has been identified.
Secondary sources report that a draft national data-protection bill has been in development to transpose the ECOWAS act, but no official text, bill number, or parliamentary stage is on the public record, so the draft cannot be verified or recorded as an instrument.
As of .
Scraping law
Guinea-Bissau has no scraping-specific statute, so each dimension rests on general law alone or is unaddressed.
The special part of the Penal Code (Decreto-Lei n.º 4/93, de 13 de Outubro, Boletim Oficial n.º 41), checked for the terms informático, computador, sistema informático, dados and acesso across its full run of articles, contains no computer-misuse or unauthorized-access offence; its only data-adjacent provisions are ordinary forgery (falsificação qualificada, art. 200) and fraud confined to fiscal and electoral contexts (fraude fiscal, art. 174; fraude no recenseamento and fraude na votação, arts. 182 and 189), none of which reaches unauthorized access to a computer system or a public website.
Lei n.º 5/2010, de 27 de Maio (Lei de Base das Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação) creates only a sector-specific interception offence running between telecommunications operators (art. 113(c)), not a general authorization-based computer-misuse offence, so open-web crawling of a public page is addressed by no criminal-law authorization test either way.
No Guinea-Bissau court decision addresses the enforceability of a browsewrap or clickwrap terms-of-service, and no 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.
Guinea-Bissau's operative copyright regime, the Bangui Agreement (Act of ) Annex VII, which takes the place of national law in the OAPI member states, confers a narrow press-quotation exception for news reporting but no text-and-data-mining exception and no sui generis database right, so mining scraped copyrighted material rests on no exception at all.
Guinea-Bissau has no comprehensive data-protection statute or supervisory authority; the ECOWAS Supplementary Act A/SA.1/01/10 on Personal Data Protection binds Guinea-Bissau by membership but has not been transposed domestically, so scraped personal data carries no publicly-available exemption or cross-border-restriction rule beyond that jurisdiction-wide absence.
As of .
Age gating law
Guinea-Bissau has no adult-content age-verification law, social-media minor-access restriction, app-store age-verification requirement, or age-appropriate design code binding a private service, exhibitor, or distributor.
Lei n.º 5/2010 de 27 de Maio (Lei de Base das Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação), read in full, imposes no age-gating or access-control duty: its Internet-governance article addresses only domain-name administration, ICANN dispute procedures, and network security, and the law's own definition of a telecommunications service expressly excludes the provision of content, so it does not reach a content publisher or platform at all.
The 1993 Penal Code (Decreto-Lei n.º 4/93) contains general criminal offenses, but even a provision addressing the sexual exploitation of minors there would be a general criminal offense rather than a gating or access-control duty binding a private service, which this topic does not register as an age instrument regardless.
As of .
Case law
No current case law for Guinea-Bissau AI law
No current case law for Guinea-Bissau privacy law
No current case law for Guinea-Bissau scraping law
No current case law for Guinea-Bissau cybersecurity law
No current case law for Guinea-Bissau communications law
No current case law for Guinea-Bissau content moderation law
No current case law for Guinea-Bissau product and AI liability law
No current case law for Guinea-Bissau digital accessibility law
No current case law for Guinea-Bissau age gating law
No current case law for Guinea-Bissau reuse law
AIDrafted 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
This page covers the instruments LexLint has researched
to a stage. Instruments named in the law library 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.
