PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad – A three-day “Workshop on Cyber-crime Legislation in the Caribbean Region” opens in Trinidad and Tobago on Tuesday, May 13 the joint initiative of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United States Department of Justice.
The workshop is expected to draw participation from representatives from the following 14 OAS member states: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago.
It is being organized as a follow-up to a recommendation from the Fifth Meeting of the Group of Governmental Experts on Cyber-Crime, which took place at OAS Headquarters in November 2007. This Experts Group comprises the working groups of the Meetings of Ministers of Justice or other Ministers or Attorneys General of the Americas (REMJA), and has received various mandates from REMJA, including on the identification of cooperation mechanisms to combat cyber-crime, and the completion of a diagnosis of national legislation, policies and practices on the subject.
Based on information provided the OAS has received from the member states to date, indicate that only 15 of the OAS member states have substantive cyber-crime legislation in place, while only 12 states have enacted procedural cyber-crime legislation. Accordingly, the topics to be covered in the workshop include, among others, an examination of best practices related to cyber-crime and existing national legislations, and the drafting of procedural and substantive cyber-crime legislation.
The OAS Department of Legal Cooperation is collaborating with the US Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section to organize the workshop, stemming from a United States offer to fund the participation of OAS member state representatives.
