Law / Guyana

Guyana

3 of 5 named instruments researched to a stage, across three of the six areas of law we track: 2 in force and 1 enacted but not yet in force. As of 19 September 2026.

AI law none researched
Privacy law 1
Scraping law 1
Cybersecurity law none researched
Age gating law none researched
News aggregation law 1

in forceenacted but not yet in forceproposedrepealed, withdrawn or blocked

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

Privacy law1 instrument, 1 enacted but not yet in force

Research summary (146 words)

Guyana's National Assembly enacted a comprehensive Data Protection Act, the Data Protection Act 2023 (Act No. 18 of 2023), gazetted 16 August 2023, but as of the date below no commencement order has brought it into force: no Data Protection Commissioner has taken office and no Data Protection Office has been established under it, so Guyana currently has no operative comprehensive personal-data statute.

Guyana's Digital Identity Card Act 2023, whose own safeguards and Commissioner are creatures of the Data Protection Act, itself came into operation while the Data Protection Act remained uncommenced.

Because the Data Protection Act does not yet bind anyone, this entry holds its lawful-basis, data-subject-rights, breach-notification, cross-border-transfer, and enforcement provisions in a single comprehensive-regime family rather than splitting them, and none of those provisions is described here pending commencement. Outside the Act, no sector-specific privacy law, biometric statute, or cross-border-transfer rule is known.

Comprehensive regime

Data Protection Act 2023

Data Protection Act 2023 (Act No. 18 of 2023), not yet commencedText of Act No. 18 of 2023, Parliament of Guyana

Commencement not set. Binds public and private bodies.

What this law does

The National Assembly gazetted the Data Protection Act 2023 as Act No. 18 of 2023 on 16 August 2023, following passage on 9 August 2023. As of the date below, no commencement order under the Act has been issued, no Data Protection Commissioner has been sworn in, and no Data Protection Office has been established under it, so the Act imposes no operative duty on any person while it remains uncommenced.

Guyana's Digital Identity Card Act 2023 came into operation before the Data Protection Act was commenced. The Digital Identity Card Act's Commissioner and safeguard duties are created by the Data Protection Act, so commentators have flagged them as unenforceable while the Data Protection Act itself remains uncommenced.

The Act's lawful-basis, data-subject-rights, breach-notification, cross-border-transfer, and enforcement provisions are not described here, because the Act does not yet bind anyone and this entry holds it as a single family until it is commenced.

What it requires

Scraping law1 instrument, 1 in force

Research summary (222 words)

Guyana has no scraping-specific statute, so general law governs each dimension separately. The Cybercrime Act, 2018 (Act No. 16 of 2018) criminalises illegal access to a computer system among a wider set of offences (illegal interception, illegal data interference, illegal system interference, and misuse of devices); how Guyanese courts would read authorisation for a public, unauthenticated page is not settled, and no reported Guyanese case on the point has been located.

No Guyanese court has ruled on the enforceability of a browsewrap or clickwrap terms-of-service against a scraper. Guyana has no domestic copyright statute; the applicable copyright law is the United Kingdom's Copyright Act 1956, extended with modifications by the Copyright (British Guiana) Order 1966, which predates the concept of a text-and-data-mining exception, so no such exception or machine-readable opt-out exists, and the Act confers no sui generis database right.

Guyana enacted a comprehensive personal-data statute, the Data Protection Act 2023 (Act No. 18 of 2023), but as of the date below no commencement order has brought it into force, so scraped personal data in Guyana is not currently subject to a comprehensive privacy-law overlay; see the privacy topic's Guyana document for that instrument.

No Guyanese 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.

Computer misuse

Cybercrime Act 2018, unauthorised access to a computer system

Guyana, Cybercrime Act, 2018, Act No. 16 of 2018Text of Act No. 16 of 2018, Parliament of Guyana, Official Gazette Legal Supplement 13 August 2018

In force since 13 August 2018.

What this law does

The Cybercrime Act 2018 (Act No. 16 of 2018) was gazetted 13 August 2018, passed by the National Assembly 20 July 2018. Illegal access to a computer system, illegal interception, illegal data interference, illegal acquisition of data, illegal system interference, and illegal devices are all offences under the Act.

The Act also creates an offence for child pornography distributed through a computer system, and separately an offence for publishing or transmitting an intimate image of a person without that person's consent. The specific section number, the exact statutory wording, and a confirmed penalty figure for the illegal-access offence itself are not stated here.

A secondary account describes the offences generally as carrying penalties ranging from months to years of imprisonment and substantial fines, without stating the illegal-access offence's own figure. The date recorded as the Act's effective date is its Gazette publication date; no separate commencement clause was located in the sources read, though public reporting of charges and convictions under the Act since 2020 confirms it is in force.

What it requires

News aggregation law1 instrument, 1 in force

Research summary (154 words)

Guyana has no domestic copyright statute of its own; the applicable copyright law is the United Kingdom's Copyright Act 1956, extended to (British) Guiana with modifications by the Copyright (British Guiana) Order 1966 (S.I. 1966 No. 79), made 31 January 1966 and entered into force 5 February 1966, and it remains the law read as Guyana's own by later legal authority.

Guyana has no press-publisher neighbouring right and no mandatory platform-to-publisher bargaining code; the 1956 Act's general fair-dealing exception for reporting current events in a newspaper, magazine, or similar periodical is the only provision reaching an aggregator's reproduction of news content, and no reported Guyanese decision applies it to a systematic news aggregator.

The 1956 Act predates the concept of a machine-readable text-and-data-mining reservation, so no opt-out mechanism of that kind exists, and no statute or case law addresses whether a hyperlink is a communication to the public or whether framing changes the answer.

Snippet reproduction

Copyright Act 1956 (UK), as extended to Guyana, reporting-current-events exception

Copyright Act 1956 (UK) (4 & 5 Eliz. 2 c. 74) s. 6, as extended with modifications to British Guiana by the Copyright (British Guiana) Order 1966 (S.I. 1966 No. 79)Copyright Act 1956 (UK), as enacted, legislation.gov.uk (The National Archives)

In force since 5 February 1966.

What this law does

Section 6 of the Copyright Act 1956 (UK) permits, without the copyright owner's consent, fair dealing with a literary, dramatic, or musical work for the purpose of reporting current events in a newspaper, magazine, or similar periodical, provided the use is accompanied by a sufficient acknowledgment. The same section separately permits fair dealing for research, private study, criticism, or review.

Section 9 extends the same fair-dealing structure to artistic works for research, private study, criticism, or review. The section carries no headline-length or short-extract cap distinct from the fair-dealing test, and no reported Guyanese decision applies it to a systematic news aggregator rather than an individual quoting or reporting on a published work.

Guyana has no dedicated press-publisher neighbouring right of the kind the European Union's Digital Single Market Directive Article 15 creates; the 1966 Order extending the 1956 Act to British Guiana modifies other named sections and schedules of the Act for local application but the located text does not show section 6 or section 9 among the sections it modifies.

Note and primary source

This page covers the instruments LexLint has researched to a stage. Instruments named in the corpus 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.