A meeting with the delegation of experts of Transnational Threats Department of the OSCE Secretariat was held at the RA Investigative Committee.
 

The expert group was in Armenia within the framework of extra-budgetary program “Capacity building in the field of cybercrime prevention and combating them in Armenia” implemented by OSCE in order to conduct an assessment of needs in the direction of establishing a Cybercrime database in the Committee, at the initiative of the RA Investigative Committee.
 

Welcoming the mission of the OSCE experts in Armenia, the Deputy Chairman of the RA Investigative Committee Arsen Ayvazyan underlined the necessity of the establishment of such database in terms of increasing the effectiveness of investigation of crimes, fight against crime both at the domestic and international levels.


Arsen Ayvazyan presented in details the process of legislative and technological reforms implemented in Armenia in the direction of introducing "digital preliminary investigation". He stated that a task was set to develop a combination and analysis component of the criminal information collected introducing new technical and software solutions for that purpose. Taking the circumstance into consideration, that pursuant to the requirements of the RA Criminal Procedure Code starting from September 1, 2023 preliminary investigation will be conducted digitally, under these conditions, the implementation of criminological analytical work of the generated digital data will be even more important. The various filters introduced by the software and the resulting analytical work will significantly increase the rates of disclosure of crimes within criminal proceedings, as well as will relieve the workload of investigators. According to the Deputy Chairman of the RA Investigative Committee, the assessment of needs, based on the study of international best practices, will allow to select the best criminal database model for Armenia.
 

The OSCE experts noted that in terms of digitization of service provision in the state administration system, development of new technologies Armenia has made quite a lot of progress, in their observations. The latter is an important prerequisite for the implementation of the idea of a database in the field of crimes, thereby promoting a data-driven criminal policy. The experts, welcoming the existing initiatives of the RA Investigative Committee in the digital field, attached importance to the possibilities of finding institutional and fundamental solutions to the problem mentioning that in leading states, units performing the function of an analytical center are created for the implementation of these functions which are equipped with the necessary technical and professional resources. The experts expressed hope that the results of their studies and the proposals to be presented will help implement the above-mentioned program.
 

During the meeting, a wide range of issues related to the existing mechanisms of data collection and exchange regarding cyber and related crimes, the existing potential, the expectations of the RA Investigative Committee, European experience, as well as the limitations of data exchange were discussed. Both parties emphasized the fact that the launch of such a database will facilitate the integration of Armenia into the international contact networks of the fight against crime and increase the effectiveness of the fight against crimes of a transnational nature directly related to cybercrimes, in particular, money laundering, trafficking, illegal turnover of narcotic drugs, as well as crimes committed using crypto currencies.