Strengthening professional development on cybercrime: OSCE regional workshop in Tashkent

The OSCE Transnational Threats Department and the OSCE Project Co-ordinator in Uzbekistan brought together twenty-five senior representatives from all the major Central Asian law enforcement educational institutions and the staff from the regional OSCE field operations to discuss best practices in training criminal justice practitioners on the investigation of cybercrimes and other crimes involving electronic evidence.

During the two-day regional workshop held on 21 and 22 November in Tashkent, the participants discussed professional development of police officers and prosecutors, adaptation and modernization of training and educational programmes, integration of e-learning, and strategic approaches to identifying needs and priorities for further training and education of criminal justice practitioners.

“All countries in Central Asia are undergoing significant digital transformation, albeit at different speeds. While this brings a lot of opportunities and benefits for our people and economies, it also brings new security risks and challenges. For example, in Kazakhstan we have seen a ten-fold increase in Internet-related crimes in the last five years. Training our law enforcement on how to investigate such crimes is thus a priority for us,” said Rashida Kadyrova, Head of the Department for Cybersecurity and Information Technologies at the Almaty Academy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

“Identifying and collecting electronic evidence or conducting investigations online are not any more the domain of specialists. Such skills are becoming more and more necessary for any law enforcement practitioner investigating all types of crime. Our educational institutions need to adapt to this reality,” stressed Gayrat Musavev, Head of Scientific and Methodological Centre for Digital Forensics at the Law Enforcement Academy of the Republic of Uzbekistan.

The workshop included representatives from all major law enforcement educational bodies in the region, namely from:  

• Kazakhstan’s Almaty and Karaganda Academies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and from Law Enforcement Academy under the Prosecutor General’s Office
• Kyrgyzstan’s Academy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, from the Training Centre of the Prosecutor General’s Office and from the Institute of State Committee of National Security
• Tajikistan’s Academy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and from the Institute for Professional Development of the Prosecutor General’s Office
• Turkmenistan’s Institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and from the Training Department of the Prosecutor General’s Office
• Uzbekistan’s Law Enforcement Academy, and from the Academy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs

The workshop was organized under the extra-budgetary project “Capacity Building on Combating Cybercrime in Central Asia” funded by the United States, Germany and the Republic of Korea.