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14 OAS countries to participate
May 13, 2008 -- A three-day “Workshop on Cyber-crime Legislation in the Caribbean
Region” opens in Trinidad and Tobago on Tuesday, 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 is one
of 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.
To date, information provided to the OAS from the
member states 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.
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