The ESCWA Cyber Legislation Digest 2.3 The Status of Cyber Legislation in the ESCWA Region The Arab region has already ventured through various initiatives that introduced some cyber laws and regulations. All Arab countries agree on the importance of cyber legislation, specifically as this feeds into the regional strategies and plans launched to prepare for a regulated ICT environment favorable to the most suitable usage of cyberspace. Cyber legislation in the ESCWA region started with the issue of the electronic transactions law in the Kingdom of Jordan, in December 2001. This was followed by a United Arab Emirates law specific to the exchange of information and electronic commerce in February 2002. The Kingdom of Bahrain introduced an electronic commerce law in September 2002. Cyber legislation was also considered an important issue, though not addressed comprehensively, in two key initiatives:   The ESCWA Regional Plan of Action1 (RPoA) developed in 2005 as an overall umbrella which outlined all actions needed to build the Information Society including cyber laws as part of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS); The Arab ICT Strategy 2 developed by the League of Arab States for the region and for the period 2007 to 2012. There was a lull in cyber legislation activities until March 2007, when the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia issued a law addressing electronic transactions followed closely by a similar law in the Sultanate of Oman in May 2008. After that, most cyber legislation activity was prompted by the initiatives of ESCWA, as discussed in this digest. In recent years, there have been a few laws aimed at improving the status of knowledge societies in the Arab region. The most recent were:    The electronic transactions law issued by Qatar (2010); The cybercrime law in the Kingdom of Jordan (2010); The e-Signature and network services law (2011) as well as the law to cover cybercrime issues in Syria (2012) Some countries such as Algeria and Morocco took the approach of introducing laws to protect intellectual property by modifying and updating their existing intellectual property laws. ESCWA prepared six tables showing the cyber legislation implemented by each ESCWA member country. Each table deals with a certain key area of cyber legislation. These key areas correspond to the six directives developed by ESCWA (see Section 3.5). 1 http://isper.escwa.un.org/RegionalActionPlans/RegionalPlanofAction/RPoADocument/tabid/68/language/enUS/Default.aspx 2 http://isper.escwa.un.org/RegionalActionPlans/ArabICTStrategy/StrategyDocument/tabid/70/language/enUS/Default.aspx 3