By: Haja Hawa Koroma
In a press conference held on the 19th May 2022 at the Ministry of Information and Communications, National Cyber Security Coordinator, MariamaYormah stated that, last year Parliament enacted the Cyber Security Act 2021 to cover cyber crimes and to protect government’s critical infrastructure in order to provide safer cyber space for all citizens.
The Cyber Security Unit is an entity under the Ministry of Information and Communications and it is a unit that is responsible to manage all cyber incidents in the country and to handle all cyber issues as well.
MariamaYormah mentioned that upon the assumption of her duty, one of her primary objectives was the empowering of the Judiciary because they need to empower the judges and prosecutors and the law enforcement to effectively and efficiently adjudicate, prosecute and also investigate cyber crimes as stated per the cyber security Act.
She added that, though actions had been taken before the enactment of the law, but it was theoretical. The National Cyber Security Center in collaboration with the Judiciary of Sierra Leone and Organized Crime West Africa Response on Cyber Security and Fight Against Cyber Crimes are organizing a regional project that is being sponsored by ECOWAS and EU, hosting a Judicial training on cyber crimes and electronic evidence from the 24th to the 27th May 2022 at the Radisson Blu Hotel.
She further mentioned that, this training will serve as a training of trainers where twenty judges including the Chief Justice will be trained because they are tutors of the Judiciary and Training Technical Institute, a training institute within the Judiciary of Sierra Leone. They will be trained on cyber crimes and cyber crime related matters.
The aim of the this training is for them to be able to institutionalize cyber crime within the Judiciary and legal Training Institute, as the cyber crime unit seeks to educate these Judges on how to handle cyber crimes matters who will in turn train other Judges and Magistrates, Prosecutors and State Counsels who works for the government of Sierra Leone because they want all of them to be trained as oppose to just a few.
They will be capacitated to interpret and apply the technicalities of the cyber security and crime Act which will deviate to some extent from the traditional court system because these are crimes that are happening in the cyber space and not the normal civil and criminal cases.
At the end of the training the cyber unit team hopes to achieve adaptation and localization aside cyber crimes and evidence, training curriculum and manual which will be provided by experts from the project for it to be taken at the Sierra Leone judicial and legal training institute and training programs for the empowerment in cyber crimes and cyber related matters of all Judicial practitioners.
