In its resolution 65/230, the General Assembly requested the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice to establish, in line with paragraph 42 of the Salvador Declaration on Comprehensive Strategies for Global Challenges: Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Systems and Their Development in a Changing World, an open-ended intergovernmental expert group, to conduct a comprehensive study of the problem of cybercrime and responses to it by Member States, the international community and the private sector, including the exchange of information on national legislation, best practices, technical assistance and international cooperation, with a view to examining options to strengthen existing and to propose new national and international legal or other responses to cybercrime.
The first meeting of the open-ended intergovernmental expert group to conduct a comprehensive study of the problem of cybercrime was held from 17 to 21 January 2011. The second meeting of the expert group was held from 25 to 28 February 2013, the third meeting of the expert group took place from 10 to 13 April 2017.
In its resolution 26/4, adopted at its twenty-sixth session in May 2017, the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice requested the Expert Group to continue its work and, in so doing, to hold periodic meetings and function as the platform for further discussion on substantive issues concerning cybercrime, keeping pace with its evolving trends, and in line with the Salvador Declaration and the Doha Declaration, and requested the Expert Group to continue to exchange information on national legislation, best practices, technical assistance and international cooperation with a view to examining options to strengthen existing responses and to propose new national and international legal or other responses to cybercrime.
In the same resolution, the Commission decided that the expert group would dedicate its future meetings to examining, in a structured manner, each of the main issues dealt with in chapters 3 to 8 of the study (as listed below), without prejudice to other issues included in the mandate of the expert group, taking into account, as appropriate, contributions received pursuant to Commission resolution 22/7 and the deliberations of the expert group at its previous meetings:
Chapter 3 Legislation and frameworks
Chapter 4 Criminalization
Chapter 5 Law enforcement and investigations
Chapter 6 Electronic evidence and criminal justice
Chapter 7 International cooperation (including sovereignty, jurisdiction and international cooperation, formal international cooperation, informal international cooperation, and extraterritorial evidence)
Chapter 8 Prevention
The fourth meeting took place from 3 to 5 April 2018. At this meeting, the expert group adopted the workplan of the expert group for the period 2018-2021.
The fifth meeting of the expert group took place from 27 to 29 March 2019. The sixth meeting was held from 27 to 29 July 2020.
At its seventh - stocktaking - meeting, the expert group finalized the reading of all compiled conclusions and recommendations from its meetings in 2018, 2019 and 2020; and agreed to transmit to the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice sixty-three (63) agreed conclusions and recommendations, as contained in the annex to the report of the meeting (UNODC/CCPCJ/EG.4/2021/2). At the same meeting, the Expert Group also considered an agenda item entitled “Discussion of future work of the Expert Group”. Divergent views were expressed regarding the future work of the Expert Group, as reflected in the statements uploaded to the website of the seventh meeting of the expert group.
