The Joint Committee of the ECOWAS Parliament has recommended that Member States develop national legislation on fighting cybercrimes in their jurisdictions and eliminate roaming charges in their countries.
These were part of the recommendations contained in the draft report of the delocalized meeting of the Joint Committee on Political Affairs, Peace, Security and African Peer Review Mechanism/Legal Affairs and Human Rights/Telecommunications and Information Technology (TIT), held at Winneba, Ghana.
According to the statement by the Speaker of the ECOWAS Parliament, Dr. Sidie Mohamed Tunis in his closing remark, the draft report may be considered at Plenary of the next session of the ECOWAS Parliament.
“The experts and resource persons have captured all the concerns and provided measures to ensuring that all issues are resolved.”
‘They have also identified the relevant intervention and mechanism, hence enabling Parliament to make an efficient contribution in ensuring that recommendations are made to Plenary at the next session”, he said. “
Dr. Tunis assured that “ECOWAS Parliament, working with all stakeholders, will endeavour to ensure that the growing threats and risks facing global cyberspace and digital networks, information systems and data in our region, are kept at bay”.
“Indeed, the report contained general recommendations, those to be implemented at the level of the ECOWAS Commission, those to be carried out by Member States as well as those to be implemented by the ECOWAS Parliament.”
Other tasks for the Commission under the recommendations are, “to assist member states on the domestication and transposition of Community Texts on TIT and specifically; the directive on fighting against cybercrime; the Supplementary Act on Electronic Transactions and the Supplementary Act on Personal Data Protection; Ensure ECOWAS Commission and Member States to take all the necessary measures in order to fully implement the free regional roaming regulation, as approved by the Council of Ministers in December, 2017 in Abuja”.
The draft report also tasks ECOWAS Parliament to look into the Administrative processes (e.g gazetting) which are delaying the application of the regulation in some Member States which needs to be stepped up.
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