Timor-Leste

Article 176(1) punishes with 3 to 10 years imprisonment any person who, for predominantly sexual purposes, uses, exposes, or represents a minor aged less than 17 years performing any sexual activity, whether real or simulated, or by any other means exhibits the sexual activity or sexual organs of a minor.

Article 176(2) applies the same penalty to producing, distributing, disseminating, importing, exporting, offering, selling, or possessing any medium of communication, instrument, document, or record for those purposes or with the aim of disseminating such acts.

The article's own text does not require the depicted minor to be a real, identifiable person, so its "whether real or simulated" and "by any other means" language reaches a computer-generated or AI-synthesised depiction of a child in the same terms as one derived from a real photograph.

Section 38(2) defers the concept of personal data, and the conditions applicable to processing it generally, to a law that Timor-Leste has never enacted. There is therefore no statutory definition of personal data, no lawful-basis scheme, no registration duty, no supervisory authority and no procedural mechanism behind the two operative rules Section 38 does state.

Adjacent Section 36 (honour and privacy) and Section 37 (inviolability of home and correspondence) protect related interests but create no personal-data-specific duty.

Section 38(1) gives every citizen a right to access personal data about them, whether it is stored in a computer system or entered into mechanical or manual records, and a right to demand the purpose of that data. The right is stated directly in the Constitution and does not wait on the implementing statute Section 38(2) calls for, so it binds on its own terms while its scope stays undefined.

No response deadline, no fee rule, no format requirement and no appeal route is stated, and there is no supervisory authority to complain to. Because no statute defines personal data, a voiceprint or faceprint a service creates is not excluded from what a citizen may ask for.

Section 38(3) prohibits processing personal data on private life, political and philosophical convictions, religious faith, party or trade union membership, and ethnical origin without the consent of the person concerned. Consent is the only basis the provision states, so there is no legitimate-interest, contract or public-task route to processing those categories.

The list is closed and does not name biometric data, genetic data or health data, so a voiceprint or faceprint falls under the Section 38(1) access right rather than under this consent bar.

Article 4(2) of the Copyright and Related Rights Code (Law No. 14/2022) gives an author the exclusive right to authorise the use of a work. Article 10(1)(l) extends copyright to a compilation or database whose selection or arrangement of its contents is itself an intellectual creation, with no sui generis right independent of that originality test.

Article 129, the Code's full list of free and permitted uses, contains no text-and-data-mining or AI-training exception and no reference to a robots.txt or other machine-readable signal. Article 147 makes it a crime of counterfeiting to use a work in any of the ways the Code provides for without the author's authorisation, punishable with imprisonment of up to three years or a fine of 150 to 250 days, doubled on recidivism, where the conduct does not amount to a more seriously punished crime.

The National Parliament approved the Code on 29 November 2022 and the President promulgated it on 20 December 2022. Article 176 provides that it enters into force 180 days after its publication, and the record located here does not establish the Jornal da República publication date needed to fix that day.

Article 129(2)(c) of the Copyright and Related Rights Code (Law No. 14/2022) permits, without the author's consent, the regular selection of periodical press articles in the form of a press review. Article 129(2)(d) permits the fixation, reproduction and public communication of fragments of a literary or artistic work when their inclusion in a news report is justified by the informational purpose pursued.

Article 129(2)(k) permits the reproduction, communication to the public or making available to the public of an article of current affairs, of economic, political or religious discussion, of a broadcast work, or of other material of the same nature, unless the rights holder has expressly reserved it.

Article 130 requires that a reproduction or quotation under paragraph (d) not be so extensive as to impair interest in the quoted work, but articles 129(2)(c) and 129(2)(k) carry no extent cap of their own in the Code's text. No reported Timorese decision applies any of the three exceptions to a systematic news aggregator rather than an individual press review or news report.

The Code's neighbouring-rights title is confined to artists, phonogram and videogram producers, and broadcasting organisations, so it creates no press-publisher neighbouring right, and the Code contains no reference to a hyperlink or to framing.