Trinidad & Tobago Hosts Workshop on Cybercrime Legislation

Government representatives from the Caribbean region met May 13-15 in Trinidad and Tobago to participate in a workshop on strengthening legislation against cybercrime.  The two-day event included sessions on international cyber-crime standards and existing national legislations, and the drafting of procedural and substantive cyber-crime legislation.

The workshop comes at a timely moment – a recent survey conducted by the OAS General Secretariat among member states indicated 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. 

40 participants from 13 OAS member states attended the meeting: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago. 

The workshop was organized pursuant to Recommendation 12 from the Fifth Meeting of the Group of Governmental Experts on Cyber-Crime, which took place at OAS Headquarters in November, 2007.  This Group is one of the working groups of the Meetings of Ministers of Justice or of Ministers or Attorneys General of the Americas (REMJA), and the REMJA has issued various mandates to the Group, including the identification of cooperation mechanisms to combat cyber-crime, and the completion of a diagnosis of national legislation, policies and practices on the topic.

The OAS, through its Department of Legal Cooperation of the Secretariat for Legal Affairs, and the United States Department of Justice, through its Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS), co-sponsored the workshop, and the United States funded the participation of OAS member state representatives.