From 5 to 9 September 2016, Ukraine will host a series of events under both the Cybercrime@Eastern Partnership II and III projects (international and public-private cooperation on cybercrime) that will launch specialized support to the Government of Ukraine in order to develop a more efficient and functional legal framework.

Law enforcement powers such as those foreseen in the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime (Articles 16 to 21 of the treaty) need to be clearly defined in national legislation, as lack of proper legal grounds for such powers adversely affects cooperation between the public sector and the industry in fighting cybercrime and is detrimental to human rights and the rule of law.

In Ukraine, public-private cooperation in cybercrime and electronic evidence, despite repeated efforts for a number of years, has been hampered, chiefly among other reasons, by the lack of coherent legal framework for exercise of procedural powers available under the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime – and, as a result of this, uneven practice of application of already available investigative powers. Availability, consistency and proportional use of these specialized solutions by the law enforcement represents, beyond reasons of efficiency for investigations, important safeguard for the private sector entities in terms of clarity and foreseeability of law, and adds to protection of individuals from arbitrary interference with their private life.

To support Ukraine in meeting these challenges, a workshop on the procedural powers of the law enforcement and security agencies will be held, in cooperation with the Training Academy of the Ministry of the Internal Affairs of Ukraine, on 5-7 September in Kyiv. Several experts representing States Parties to the Budapest Convention (namely, Estonia and Croatia with written input from specialized cybercrime prosecutors from Romania and Germany) will present the notions of electronic evidence, definitions of subscriber information, traffic data and content information, implementation of procedural powers required by the Budapest Convention, and discuss the best ways to integrate these notions and provisions into the legislation of Ukraine. The workshop will be followed by visits to key government agencies tasked with law reform in Ukraine to collect further information and discuss problems with current legislative framework for public-private cooperation on cybercrime.

These two events are initial steps in the series of other activities aimed at supporting Ukraine in 2016 and 2017 through Cybercrime@Eastern Partnership projects, which will identify opportunities for legal reform and develop proposals to strengthen Ukraine’s national legal framework on international and public-private cooperation on cybercrime and electronic evidence, in order to ensure closer compliance with the provisions of the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime.