Online safety & content laws in Mauritius (2026)

2018 amendments to Section 46 of the ICT Act 2001 criminalise sending or sharing messages that are 'obscene, indecent, offensive, abusive, threatening, false or misleading' or likely to 'cause annoyance, humiliation, distress or anxiety', carrying up to 10 years' imprisonment. The Mauritius Supreme Court ruled part of the provision (46(h)(ii)) unconstitutionally vague in 2021.

Under Section 18(m) of the ICT Act, the ICTA is mandated to 'take steps to regulate or curtail harmful and illegal content on the Internet'. Mauritius was the first African country to deploy a centralised Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) filtering solution blocking CSAM at the ISP level.

Act No. 16 of 2021 (in force December 2021) repealed the Computer Misuse and Cybercrime Act 2003 and updated cybercrime offences (unauthorised access, data/system interference, cyber extortion). It formally established CERT-MU as the national cybersecurity coordination agency and introduced critical-infrastructure protection obligations.

On 31 October 2024, the ICTA directed ISPs to block Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok ahead of the 11 November 2024 general elections, citing leaks of alleged illegal wiretapping recordings as a threat to national security. The ban was lifted on 2 November 2024 after 24 hours following strong domestic and international opposition.

The ICTA's 2021 consultation paper proposed routing all internet traffic through a government-controlled proxy for decryption and archiving, and creating a National Digital Ethics Committee (NDEC) and Technical Enforcement Unit (TEU) to identify and remove online content. Following significant opposition from civil society, Mozilla, EFF and Google (and ~23,000 petition signatures), the proposals were withdrawn.

Mauritius has no dedicated platform-liability safe-harbour framework analogous to the EU DSA, nor specific statutory age-verification requirements for online platforms. The National Cybersecurity Strategy 2023–2026 addresses resilience and capacity-building but does not establish a DSA/OSA-style online-safety duty-of-care regime.