Deepfakes and Monaco's Digital Law

On the evening of 29 June 2026, Monaco's National Council voted through proposition de loi n° 281, on strengthening the means of fighting and preventing hateful content online. It passed with 19 votes in favour and 2 abstentions. Two things in it should interest anyone running a business with a public-facing website in the Principality: a faster route to getting unlawful content taken down, and — for the first time in Monegasque law — a definition of the deepfake.

Nothing here is in force. That is the point of writing about it now rather than in a year.

What was actually voted, and what happens next

Monaco's legislative process makes a distinction that gets flattened in most coverage. A proposition de loi is a text originating from the National Council. It does not become law by being voted. The Government has to take it up and return it as a projet de loi, which then goes back through the Council. National Council President Thomas Brezzo publicly urged the Minister of State to convert this one without delay, which tells you the Council expects movement — but the timetable is the Government's, not the Council's.

So: a direction of travel, backed by a near-unanimous vote, with no commencement date. The precedent worth remembering is Bill 1.093, the broader digital overhaul that has been working through the system since 2024. Monaco legislates carefully and on its own clock.

The takedown route

The text amends Law No. 1.383 of 2 August 2011 — the "Principauté Numérique" law that underpins Monaco's digital economy — and it follows recommendations made to Monaco by ECRI, the Council of Europe's anti-racism body.

The mechanism reported is a two-track one. Any person with a legitimate interest can ask the Minister of State to open an administrative removal procedure against unlawful content, with response deadlines attached. If the Minister is not approached, declines, or does not answer within the stated time, that person can go to the President of the Court of First Instance for expedited removal — or, failing removal, blocking of access.

The stated problem it addresses is a practical one: reports of illicit content rose roughly 40% in Monaco between 2023 and 2025, while only about 30% of reports led to prompt deletion. The gap is enforcement speed, not the absence of a prohibition.

For a business, the significance is directional rather than immediate. Monaco is building a domestic route for content removal instead of relying on whatever a foreign platform's own reporting form happens to do. Monaco is not an EU member state, so the EU's Digital Services Act does not apply here automatically — the Principality writes its own equivalents.

"Hypertrucage": the deepfake gets a legal name

The more forward-looking part of the text is that it defines hypertrucage — the French term for deepfakes, meaning AI-generated or AI-manipulated media presented as authentic — alongside a definition of an artificial intelligence system. It also frames a prevention side: awareness campaigns and training for the professionals concerned.

Defining a thing in law is the step that makes it actionable later. Once "hypertrucage" exists as a legal category in Monegasque texts, subsequent rules can attach to it without starting from scratch.

Why this lands harder in Monaco than elsewhere

The Principality's economy is concentrated in sectors where a convincing fake is worth real money: private wealth, family offices, real estate, yachting, luxury retail. These are businesses whose principals are named, photographed and quoted publicly, and whose clients are used to closing significant transactions through personal relationships.

That combination is exactly what synthetic media exploits. The realistic scenarios are not political — they are a cloned voice on a call authorising a transfer, a fabricated video of a named director endorsing an investment, a fake account using your brand marks to solicit deposits. None of that requires the new text to be in force to be a problem today. What the text changes is that, eventually, there may be a clearer domestic path to acting on it.

Treat this as an argument for monitoring your brand and reputation systematically rather than discovering the problem when a client calls.

What to put in place now

Four things are worth doing regardless of when the law lands, because each is useful on its own terms.

Give people a way to report to you. If your site carries reviews, comments, a forum, a jobs board, or any user-submitted field, publish a named contact route for reporting content and log what arrives. Handling reports well is a process, not a page.

Keep evidence properly. Screenshots, URLs, timestamps, and a record of when you first saw it. Any removal request — administrative or judicial — will be decided on what you can show. Handle any personal data in those records under Monaco's own framework, Law No. 1.565 and the APDP, not on the assumption that European rules apply directly.

Fix the verification gap internally. Deepfake fraud almost always defeats a process, not a technology. A callback rule on any payment instruction received by voice or video, using a number you already hold, closes most of it.

Label your own AI-generated content. If you use AI in your marketing workflow, being able to show what was synthetic and disclosed is a cheap insurance policy in a market moving toward defining these terms in statute.

And keep your site maintainable. Moderation tooling, reporting endpoints and audit logs are far easier to add to a site under active maintenance than to one that has not been touched since launch.

The honest caveat

This is a proposition de loi, not a law. The final text may differ from what was voted, the deadlines are not yet fixed in a published instrument, and none of the above is legal advice. Before making a compliance decision on the strength of it, speak to a Monegasque lawyer. What is safe to conclude is the direction: Monaco intends to make removal faster and to name synthetic media in its statute book.

If you want a review of how your site handles user-generated content, brand impersonation and moderation before any of this becomes obligatory, get in touch.