Constitution of the Fourth Republic of Madagascar, 2010, Article 13 (Inviolability of the person, the home and secrecy of correspondence)

Article 13 of the 2010 Constitution of the Fourth Republic of Madagascar is the country's principal constitutional guarantee of personal privacy and the confidentiality of communications. It provides that every individual is assured of the inviolability of his or her person, home (domicile) and the secrecy of correspondence (le secret de sa correspondance), and that no search may take place except under the law and on the written order of the competent judicial authority, save in cases of flagrant offence. The same article protects freedom of conscience and the security of the person, situating communications privacy within a broader cluster of liberty and due-process protections. For the Digital Rights collection, Article 13 is included because it satisfies the inclusion bar on its first limb: it contains express communications-privacy language, the constitutional secrecy of correspondence, that provides the textual anchor for protecting digital communications, electronic messaging and metadata against arbitrary state interception. Madagascar's data-protection statute (Loi n° 2014-038) and its cybercrime statute (Loi n° 2014-006) both operate against this constitutional backdrop, and the secrecy-of-correspondence guarantee is the provision to which any challenge to interception, surveillance or content-blocking would ultimately be referred. Inclusion rests on textual communications-privacy specificity rather than on a prominent, stand-alone digital-context constitutional case: Malagasy constitutional jurisprudence applying Article 13 to digital surveillance or internet restrictions is sparse and not consistently reported, and this entry does not assert the existence of such a body of case law. The provision is enforced, in principle, through the Haute Cour Constitutionnelle (HCC), which reviews the conformity of legislation with the Constitution, including the data-protection and cybercrime laws. The oversight that Article 13 affords in practice should not be overstated: there is no specialised constitutional remedy for communications privacy, and enforcement depends on ordinary judicial and constitutional-review channels. This entry is a constitutional provision rather than a dedicated digital-rights statute; it is recorded as an Act with its constitutional character made explicit. It complements, and is cross-referenced to, Madagascar's cybercrime statute, which carries the operational interception and content provisions that engage the Article 13 guarantee.

1. 1Article 13 guarantees the inviolability of the person, the home (domicile) and the secrecy of correspondence, the textual basis for protecting digital communications privacy
2. 2Searches permitted only under the law and by written order of the competent judicial authority, except in cases of flagrant offence
3. 3Sits alongside guarantees of freedom of conscience, expression and personal security in the Constitution's bill of rights
4. 4Provides the constitutional reference point for challenges to interception, surveillance and content-blocking under ordinary legislation
5. 5Enforced through constitutional review by the Haute Cour Constitutionnelle (HCC); no specialised communications-privacy remedy
6. 6Inclusion in the Digital Rights collection justified on limb (a): express secrecy-of-correspondence language; not premised on a stand-alone digital constitutional case