Loi 18-07 art. 45 bis 1 (ex-art. 11) — the automated-decision rule now reaches only criminal-justice processing; Loi 25-11 repealed the general-purpose rule outright
Binds Only the actors listed exhaustively in art. 45 bis: the judicial authority; services and bodies legally empowered to search out offences and identify their perpetrators, within the limits of their attributions and competences; auxiliaires de justice, within their legal attributions and for a period proportionate to the missions entrusted to them; and the services of the prison administration. Art. 45 bis further requires such processing to identify its controller, purpose, data subjects, the third parties to whom the data may be communicated, the origin of the data and its security measures, dispenses with the prior consent of the data subject notwithstanding arts. 7 and 8, and confines the data collected to the Title's own purposes. The first limb of art. 45 bis 1 binds the courts themselves. Ordinary responsables du traitement outside the criminal-justice context are no longer bound by any automated-decision rule in Loi 18-07 following the repeal of art. 11. The Law's territorial scope (art. 4) is unchanged: controllers established on Algerian territory or in a State whose legislation is recognised as equivalent, and controllers not established in Algeria that resort to processing means situated on Algerian territory other than for transit. Art. 6, as rewritten by art. 2 of Loi 25-11, now excludes from the Law only data processed by a natural person in the exclusive course of personal or domestic activities and not destined for communication or dissemination, and data relating to national defence and national security.. Article 11 of Loi n° 18-07, which was Algeria's general-purpose automated-decision rule, was repealed outright on 24 July 2025 by art. 7 of Loi n° 25-11 (« Sont abrogées, les dispositions des articles 10 et 11 de la loi n° 18-07 »). It was not renumbered or re-enacted in the general part of the Law. Its wording survives, almost verbatim, as art. 45 bis 1 — but art. 6 of Loi 25-11 places that article inside a newly created Titre V bis (arts. 45 bis to 45 bis 14) headed « Traitement des données à caractère personnel à des fins de prévention et de détection des infractions, d'investigations, d'enquêtes, de poursuites pénales, d'exécution et d'application des peines ». Art. 45 bis 1 keeps three limbs: judicial decisions requiring an appraisal of a person's conduct may not be founded on the sole automated processing of personal data involving an evaluation of aspects of their personality; no other decision producing legal effects may be taken on the sole basis of an automated processing whose object is to characterise a person or to evaluate aspects of their personality; and decisions taken in concluding or performing a contract where the person was put in a position to present observations, together with decisions satisfying that person's own request, are deemed not taken on that sole basis. What changed is scope, not wording. Art. 45 bis, the opening article of the same Title, states exhaustively who may carry out processing under it — the judicial authority, services and bodies legally empowered to investigate offences and identify their perpetrators, auxiliaires de justice, and the prison administration services — and confines data collected under the Title to those same purposes. An ordinary private-sector controller in Algeria is therefore no longer subject to any automated-decision restriction under Loi 18-07: employment screening, credit and insurance scoring and similar profiling decisions lost their statutory constraint on 24 July 2025. Loi 25-11 also inserts, for the first time, a statutory definition of « profilage » into art. 3 of Loi 18-07 (by art. 2 of Loi 25-11), and narrows the art. 6 exclusions to purely domestic processing and to national-defence and national-security data — criminal-justice data, previously excluded from the Law altogether, is now inside it and governed by Titre V bis. The Law still carries no right to an explanation of the logic involved and no human-review right; the opportunity to present observations exists only inside the contractual deeming clause.
Repeal and relocation verified directly against the Journal officiel: JO n° 48 of 28 Moharram 1447 corresponding to 24 July 2025, Loi n° 25-11, at p. 14 of the French edition. Art. 7 of Loi 25-11 repeals arts. 10 and 11 of Loi 18-07 outright and does not renumber them in place; art. 6 of Loi 25-11 inserts Titre V bis (arts. 45 bis to 45 bis 14), whose art. 45 bis 1 carries the former art. 11 wording. The open question left by the first pass — whether any automated-decision restriction still reaches general, non-law-enforcement controllers — is now closed on the text and closed in the negative. Two things settle it. First, Loi 25-11 contains exactly eight articles (art. 1 object, art. 2 rewriting arts. 3 and 6, art. 3 adding art. 27 bis on the national authority's regional poles, art. 4 adding Chapitre I bis on the data protection delegate, art. 5 adding Chapitre 1 bis 1 on processing registers, art. 6 adding Titre V bis, art. 7 the repeal, art. 8 the publication clause), so no general-scope replacement for art. 11 was enacted anywhere. Second, art. 45 bis — the opening article of the Title in which the surviving rule sits — states that processing for the Title's purposes « ne peut être effectué que par » the judicial authority, legally empowered investigating services, auxiliaires de justice and the prison administration, and confines data collected under the Title to those purposes. The Title therefore has a closed personal scope, and the « toute autre décision » limb of art. 45 bis 1 is bounded by it. One textual oddity is recorded rather than resolved: the third-paragraph deeming clause about contract formation and performance is a private-law construct carried over verbatim from art. 11, and sits awkwardly inside a criminal-justice title — it reads as an unadapted transposition rather than as a signal of wider scope, but no Algerian interpretive authority on the point was located. Date: art. 8 of Loi 25-11 is a bare publication clause with no commencement article and no deferral, so the date used is the date of the Journal officiel that carries the Law, 24 July 2025, read from the masthead of the JORADP French edition. Confidence stays medium for the same reason it was medium before: the Algerian general publication-to-force rule (art. 4 of the Code civil, Ordonnance n° 75-58) is not primary-source verified, because the 1975 Journal officiel volumes on JORADP are image scans with no recoverable text layer, so it could not be confirmed whether force attaches on the day of publication or the day after. Previously this row recorded art. 11 of Loi 18-07 with a date of 10 June 2018 (JO n° 34) and described it as binding controllers generally, including for hiring; that is wrong for any date after 24 July 2025 and the roles and topics have been narrowed accordingly. Confirmed 2026-09-25: the Algerian general publication-to-force rule is art. 4 of the Code civil (Ordonnance n. 75-58), decrypted and read directly from the Ministry of Justice's own consolidated PDF: laws are executoires (generally binding force) from the day of Journal Officiel publication itself, while the jour-franc delay applies only to individual opposability (obligatoire), a distinct concept. This confirms the recorded 24 July 2025 date is the correct force-attaching date; confidence raised from medium to high.
Stated maximum penalty — No criminal offence attaches to art. 45 bis 1. Loi 25-11 has eight articles and none of them touches the penal chapter (arts. 56 to 74) or the sanction articles 46 and 47 of Loi 18-07 — verified article by article against the enacted text. The penal chapter enumerates the articles it punishes and, having been drafted in 2018, cannot and does not name art. 45 bis 1; art. 47's fixed fine of 500,000 DA remains confined to arts. 32, 34, 35, 36 and to the notifications under arts. 4, 14 and 16. The only route that reaches art. 45 bis 1 is art. 46, under which non-observance of the provisions of the Law by the responsable du traitement leads the Autorité nationale to take administrative measures: a warning, a mise en demeure, provisional withdrawal for a period not exceeding one year or definitive withdrawal of the declaration receipt or the authorisation, and a fine for which the text fixes no amount. Decisions of the national authority are appealable to the Conseil d'Etat. Whether art. 46 is a workable route against a court or a prosecuting service — the actors art. 45 bis 1 now principally addresses — is not resolved by the text: art. 45 bis 12 gives the national authority verification and inspection powers under the Title but expressly reserves the prerogatives of the judicial power.