The ESCWA Cyber Legislation Digest 2. The second step was to assess the status of legislation in each ESCWA member country. This would result in identifying gaps between what is present and what is required. Legislators can then opt for one of three approaches:    3. Drafting local laws; Ratifying international treaties; Adopting a model law available on a regional or international level. A mechanism was proposed for enacting the new laws and consisted of the following activities:  Creating specialized focus groups: of concerned ministries, ICT experts and legal professionals in cyber legislation.  Based on the recommendations of the focus groups, model laws would be defined, discussed and enlarged to include laws that were hierarchically broken down into specific sections and articles.  Interviews and workshops would then be conducted to discuss the laws, acquaint key stakeholders with these laws, address issues of compliance with existing laws, subsequently, laying the groundwork for eventual implementation.  The final phase, before enacting the laws, would include discussion sessions concerning the draft laws. The aim of these sessions is for stakeholders to ensure that the draft laws cover all possible situations. The importance of these recommendations directly led to the need for regional harmonization amongst ESCWA member countries. 3.4 The Six ESCWA Cyber Legislation Templates The first step towards the harmonization of cyber laws in the ESCWA region was the development of six templates during 2007 and 2008. The six templates include a set of headings broken down hierarchically. The headings identify areas of cyber legislation concern, to be addressed by every country embarking on the introduction of robust cyber legislation and regulations. The templates can be used as follows:   To identify the breakdown of the various issues of each of the six areas of a directive and hence use such a hierarchical breakdown for addressing the issues nationally. To evaluate the status of a country vis-à-vis cyber legislation. ESCWA applied this template for two member countries (Syria and the Kingdom of Bahrain) and prepared reports summarizing their findings. 10