Funding a challenge to curb cyber crime in Papua New Guinea

Funding remains a challenge for the Papua New Guinea Department of Communication and other stakeholders to conduct training for law enforcers to implement the cybercrime law.
The Department’s acting secretary Paulias Korni said it was looking forward to conducting trainings however needed more funding to do so.
He said yesterday that since the cyber crime legislation was passed in Parliament last year, the number of prosecutions f remained unknown and one reason was that law enforcers were not familiar with the nature of the law.
He said to date the sector has been working with the Police Department and as a result established a cybercrime unit that will be responsible to ensure the law was enforced.
“Apart from that we will have trainings for the Judiciary to train our judges and the magistrates including the police department so that they understand the essence of the law.
“We have done a couple of training but I think we can do more training as it is very important as we need to understand the nature of the law because it is highly technical.
“We are now waiting for our partners at the National Telecommunication Unit to come on board and approve that.
“We will make some announcements on when these trainings can be held but off course we need some funding as funding has been one of the major challenges and as soon as we get some funding we will carry these trainings,” he said.
Mr Korni said the responsibility to implement the law is with the police and not with the department and the National Information and Communication Technology Authority (NICTA).
He said NICTA’s role is to provide technical assistance when needed to enforce the law. Post Courier