Rwanda
AI behavior law: bot and agent disclosure, crawler and training-data rules, automated-agent transactions, and algorithmic decision-making.
Summary
Rwanda presents moderate crawling risk. Law No. 60/2018 on Prevention and Punishment of Cybercrimes Art. 16 criminalises intentional and unlawful access to a computer or computer system; public pages carry implicit authorisation, so the offence is unlikely to be triggered by crawling openly accessible content, but a ToS prohibition or technical barrier can establish unlawfulness. Law No. 058/2021 on Protection of Personal Data and Privacy (NCSA supervisory authority, in force October 2021; full compliance required by October 2023) applies to collection of personal data including from publicly available sources; public availability does not exempt processing; data localisation applies absent an NCSA offshore-storage certificate — stricter than the Kenya/Uganda transfer-adequacy model. Law No. 31/2009 on Protection of Intellectual Property protects original compilations on an originality basis; fair dealing exceptions are narrow. No sui generis database right; no TDM exception. Rwanda HAS ratified the AU Malabo Convention (ratified 21 November 2019; Convention entered force June 2023). No scraping-specific case law exists.
Automated-access legality
Carried forward from the crawler-law index. Governs whether automated clients may access public websites in this jurisdiction.
| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Authorization test | without permission |
| Public-page carve-out | unsettled |
| Terms-of-service browsewrap enforceable | notice dependent |
| Terms-of-service clickwrap enforceable | yes |
| Copyright exception model | fair dealing narrow |
| Text and data mining — commercial status | unsettled |
| Text and data mining — opt-out mechanism | none |
| robots.txt legal weight | non binding notice |
| AI training-specific law | none |
| Privacy regime | Law No. 058/2021 on Protection of Personal Data and Privacy (NCSA) |
| Trespass to chattels | not recognized |
Last reviewed: 2026-05-24. Confidence: medium. Not legal advice.