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  1. CT TECH National capacity building workshop in Sarajevo

CT TECH National capacity building workshop in Sarajevo

From 1-4 April, UNOCT completed the first phase of its CT TECH capacity-building with a workshop in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina.

The event rounds off a series of 5 national capacity-building workshops conducted by the Office over the past four months in Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya, the Philippines, Uzbekistan for 146 participants.

During this time, the participants:

  1. discussed roles, responsibilities, and structures in place for assessing terrorist threats;
  2. elaborated how the use of new technologies can be integrated in these assessments;
  3. brainstormed and evaluated threat scenarios of new technologies;
  4. prioritized them against other national security risks;
  5. developed policy responses to mitigate the threats; and
  6. measured effectiveness of their policy choices;
  7. conducted self-assessment of their current law enforcement capabilities and readiness to adopt new technologies for counter-terrorism; and
  8. identified priority areas for development.

The national workshops were well received and provided insights to the challenges that CT TECH Partner States face. UNOCT continues to receive requests for further assistance on specific new technologies in countering terrorism, e.g. Artificial Intelligence, Dark Web, and cryptocurrency investigations. 

From May to June, the CT TECH initiative will hold follow-up visits to the five member states to review progress made towards enhancing practices of conducting threat assessment and policies developed to counter the use of technology for terrorist purposes.

Background

CT TECH is funded by the European Union and implemented by UNOCT (under the UNCCT Global Counter-Terrorism Programme on Cybersecurity and New Technologies) and INTERPOL.

The goal of the 2.5-year initiative is to strengthen the capacities of law enforcement and criminal justice authorities to counter the exploitation of new technologies for terrorist purposes and to leverage new technologies in the fight against terrorism.  

Since its launch, over 1,000 officials from 35 CT TECH Partner States benefited from this initiative.  

The first phase of the CT TECH initiative strengthened selected Member States to counter the use of new technologies for terrorist purposes in full compliance with international human rights norms and standards, rule of law, and in gender-responsive manner.

Specifically, we shared good practices with counterterrorism policy makers, law enforcement and criminal justice authorities to achieve the following objectives:  

  • Better understanding on how to enhance approaches and processes towards conducting threat assessment (intent and capability) on the use new technologies for terrorist purposes by threat actors to inform policy and operational decision makers; 
  • Enable policy makers to develop and/or update appropriate national CT policies and strategies in a way that accounts for the complexities of technological developments;
  • Facilitate a baseline self-assessment, gap analysis and prioritization development roadmap of national counterterrorism law enforcement capabilities to counter the use of new technologies for terrorist purposes and leverage new technologies to counter terrorism. 

The capacity-building assistance is based on the good practices developed in the handbooks and reference guides of the CT TECH Initiative and launched during the third United Nations Counter-Terrorism Week in 2023.