ODPP undergoes training on cybercrime

The first National Conference on Cybercrime and e-evidence for Prosecutors has allowed the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions to better understand cybercrime, improve their work and increase collaboration with stakeholders.

The ODPP says they will also be exploring the need for accreditation of their investigation processes to ensure they remain consistently at par with internationally accepted standards.

They say the conference offered the possibility to facilitate discussions on successful cross-border investigations and prosecutions and identified difficulties and obstacles of legal or practical nature that will ease the cooperation between national prosecution authorities.

They say it also provided high-level contributions to prosecution-related issues and contributed to the development of informal or formal contacts, as appropriate, between prosecution authorities.

The Office says they had discussions on relevant regional and cross-regional trends of cybercrime and the appropriate investigative and prosecutorial measures to counter them and formulated common observations or opinions.

They say it also allowed them to share experiences and good practices in judicial cooperation in criminal matters and in the use of mutual legal assistance instruments and special investigation techniques for the investigation and prosecution of cybercrimes.

The Acting Director of Public Prosecutions, John Rabuku, in his closing remarks, says it was intended to be a conference of intense introduction to cybercrime and information sharing, but he envisages the conference would be an opportunity to collectively hone into the specific areas of training and capacity building that they need as a prosecution service.

He says they will also be having meaningful conversations with the Office of the Attorney of the General so they can better understand the reasons behind the drafting of certain provisions in the Cybercrime Act.

The two-day conference was organised by the ODPP in collaboration with and co-funded by the Global Action on Cybercrime Enhanced GLACY-e joint project of the European Union (EU) and Council of Europe.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime also co-funded the Conference through the support of the United States of America.