The ESCWA Cyber Legislation Digest This study was discussed in a peer review meeting in 2007 and a meeting was set up to discuss the Model and review its findings (details can be found in Appendix B: Timeline). The study was presented with two major objectives. First Objective: Situational Analysis The first objective was to present a review of the status of cyber legislation in the region. This covered several areas of analysis including: 1. A survey of legal texts, international conventions, directives, treaties and national laws of selected countries. 2. A review of cyber legislation activities in the ESCWA region. This included full legal texts and articles of laws on such cyber-related topics such as e-Commerce, consumer protection, intellectual property and e-Transactions. 3. Ratifications made by ESCWA member countries to international conventions were outlined. 4. An analysis of current cyber or cyber related legislation in the ESCWA region, in terms of whether such laws exhausted all topics as compared with international conventions and non-Arab cyber laws. Second Objective: Recommendations The second objective was to present recommendations for drafting model cyber laws in the ESCWA region. This was crucial as most ESCWA member countries still lack such legislation. Such a lack can be attributed to reasons such as:    an underestimation of the importance of and the need for such legislation; the judicial bodies in some countries not having a significant enough backlog of cyber related cases to cause concern; countries have not been able to use existing laws and provisions by analogy and through broad interpretation in order to adjudicate cases dealing with cyberspace. The document presented the following recommendations: 1. Identification of the cyber legislation topics to be addressed as:       Data protection; Cybercrime; Censorship and freedom of expression; Privacy on the Internet; E-Commerce; Telecommunications. These were used to develop ESCWA’s six directives (see Section ‎3.43.5). 9