Statistics on cybercrime and electronic evidence are essential to quantify the level of threats posed by the different forms of cybercrimes and cyber-enabled crimes, to support more efficient investigations and prosecutions and to better inform strategic decisions of policy-makers and regulators. In addition, analysis of figures and trends allow criminal justice authorities to have a better understanding of their own capacities and performance to deal with cybercrime and electronic evidence.

Nonetheless, often there are a number of aspects in procedures related to collection of statistics on cybercrime and electronic evidence, which negatively impact the process such as partially accessible or non-functioning reporting systems, poor collection and collation of data, inadequate management, misinterpretation of data protection issues, weak application in the policy-making cycle.

All of these issues could mislead and undermine the efforts of the criminal justice system to reduce the level of threat and harm caused by criminal behaviour, so it is crucial to address them through structured discussion, which could result in a concrete roadmap for implementation of improvement actions to be undertaken.

To this end, the regional workshop gathered cybercrime investigation units, judges, prosecutors, representatives of the Ministry of Justice as well as national CERTs/CSIRTs from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”, Turkey, Kosovo*¹, Romania and Estonia and gave the opportunity to consider a number of essential aspects related to the collection and use of criminal justice statistics on cybercrime and electronic evidence, such as:

• current issues in the region related to the collection of reliable statistics and in their use to monitor the performance of criminal justice capacities regarding cybercrime and electronic evidence, informing policy and decision making, facilitating accountability and allowing the public to assess risk of crime;
• a benchmark of the systems to report and record cybercrime and cyberenabled crimes;
• the need to efficiently correlate statistics on cybersecurity incidents and cybercrimes;
• an analysis of sources of statistics, reliability of data and methods of analysis, and how these affect criminal justice policies; and
• a common methodology for the collection and analysis of statistics on cybercrime and electronic evidence.

• Agenda
• iPROCEEDS project website

^{₁ This designation is without prejudice to positions on status, and is in line with UNSC 1244 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo Declaration of Independence.}