Georgian authorities have been active in the area of addressing and regulating public-private cooperation on cybercrime and electronic evidence for a fairly long time. Georgia was one of the first countries of the region to adopt and implement the Memorandum of Cooperation between the law enforcement and major Internet service providers 2010, based on the Council of Europe capacity building efforts and, most importantly, on the text of the Guidelines for the Cooperation Between Law Enforcement and Internet Service Providers Against Cybercrime. However, these advances have been recently hampered due to the recent judgment of the Constitutional Court of Georgia regarding legality and proportionality of the data retention system in Georgia, and generally increasing loss of trust between the government and Internet industry due to both country-specific and global trends.

In order to discuss these challenges and possible solutions to overcome them, the Council of Europe, through its Cybercrime Programme Office (Bucharest, Romania) and under the Cybercrime@EAP III project, organized a workshop on public-private cooperation on cybercrime and electronic evidence in Tbilisi on 9-10 November 2016. The experts of the Council of Europe, representatives of C-PROC and country team members representing law enforcement policy making institutions in Georgia discussed legal aspects, best practices and possible solutions to make partnership between the government and Internet industry work.

On 11 November, the project and its expert contributed also to the Information and Cyber Security Day of the Georgian IT Innovations Conference with a dedicated presentation on standards and practices of public-private cooperation on cybercrime and electronic evidence. Georgian IT Innovations Conference is one of the largest events of its kind in the region, bringing together government and IT industry representatives from many countries, and was an opportunity for the Council of Europe to make its work on the issue of public-private partnership more visible and relevant in the regional context.

The Cybercrime@EAP III project will continue its support to Georgia and to other states of the Eastern Partnership in order to achieve its objectives on making public-private cooperation on cybercrime and electronic evidence more effective.