Cameroon

National jurisdiction · as of 2026-09-04

Cameroon has enacted a broad child-online-protection charter rather than a narrow adult-content-verification or social-media-minor statute. Loi n°2023/009 du 25 juillet 2023 portant charte de protection des enfants en ligne au Cameroun defines a child as any person under 18 (article 3); at 18, a person may validly give online consent and is treated as able to appreciate the deviant or dangerous character of certain content.

The charter brings private-sector actors, internet access providers, content providers, information-system operators, social-network promoters, online-advertising professionals, and audiovisual-communication operators, into the same child-protection duties as public authorities (articles 11 to 14), requiring them to raise awareness among children of ineligible or dangerous sites.

General obligations require these actors to stop indexing content that harms a child's dignity and to report such content to the competent authorities; specific obligations require making available to minor users guides to good practice in cyberspace and to dangerous activities.

Enforcement combines administrative and criminal sanctions: a private actor found in breach is given formal notice by the telecommunications-regulation body to come into compliance within 15 days, and only after that deadline passes unmet can the regulator pronounce administrative sanctions, which are essentially financial; criminal sanctions, defined from article 28 onward, range from fines through imprisonment to prohibitions and temporary closures.

The charter's gazetted text is not publicly available in an accessible form; the provisions described here are as reported by professional legal commentary, and its commencement is not established.