A four-day conference on cyber legislation in the West African sub-region is underway in Accra, Ghana.
The conference aims is to strengthen regional harmonisation of laws on electronic commerce, ensure the implementation at the national level of regional legal frameworks on electronic transactions, cyber-crime and data protection, and to strengthen cyber legislation and criminal justice capacities on the basis of the Budapest Convention on cyber-crime.
The conference is jointly organised by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the ECOWAS Commission, African Centre for Cyberlaw and Cybercrime Prevention (ACCP) and the Council of Europe.
Participants include the judiciary, law enforcement agencies, academia, civil society organisations, and security experts from 14 countries, including Ghana from the sub-region and beyond.
Dr Edward Kofi Omane Boamah, Minister for Communications, said in a speech read on his behalf by Mr Desmond Boateng that cyber crime posed a huge challenge to efforts to develop the sub-region’s economy through ICTs.
He said it was crucial that African countries harnessed the power of ICT for development of their economies, as well as guarded against the use of internet and ICT applications to engage in racial or ethnic propaganda, fraud, terrorism, xenophobia, violence, child pornography and other forms of exploitation.
