‘Cyber laws should be included in curriculum’

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Government should take the initiative to adopt a uniform policy to include the cyber laws as part of the law education in the country, Cyber Appellate Tribunal chairman Justice Rajesh Tandon has said.

“Presently, not many institutions have included Cyber Laws in their curriculum. This should change. For this, the Centre should take the initiative and ensure that the Cyber Laws are taught in each and every law institutions in the country,” Rajesh Tandon said.

While inaugurating the training programme on the Cyber Security and Cyber Law for Judicial Officers, organised by the Institute of Management in Government (IMG) here on Saturday, Justice Rajesh Tandon pointed out that most of the cyber crimes were reported from Kerala and Hyderabad.

He added that though the prosecutors and judicial officers belong to one family, the yield of knowledge that should be gathered was different.

“For adjudicating the cyber offences such as sending threatening messages by email, sending defamatory messages by email, forgery of electronic records, bogus websites, cyber frauds, email spoofing, web-jacking, email abuse, online sale of drugs and online sale of arms, the power has been given to the adjudicating officer, who will be appointed by the Centre. Most probably, it will be the respective IT secretary of the State and he will have the powers of a civil court. The appeal lies with the Appellate Tribunal and the Civil courts do not have the authority to grant injunction in such offences. So, the prosecutors and judicial officers should have a thorough knowledge about where the complaints have to the filed,” he said.

Rajesh Tandon said that a two-day training programme would be organised for the secretaries of the Information Technology departments in May to create awareness among them on the law and procedure.

Government Law College principal A Prasanna and District Judge Ramakrishnan also attended.