News and press releases

Protecting soft targets, such as public events, from terrorist attacks was the focus of an OSCE workshop held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, from 18 to 20 February. The event, bringing together 30 government officials, was organized by the OSCE Transnational Threats Department and the OSCE Programme Office in Bishkek.

The OSCE Transnational Threats Department, in co-operation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, organized a study visit from 2 to 6 February for policy and technical points of contact from Eastern Europe, South-Eastern Europe and South Caucasus, who are a part of the OSCE’s network created in line with confidence-building measure number 8 (CBM 8), one of the OSCE’s 16 cyber/ICT security confidence-building measures.

From 27 to 31 January, the OSCE’s Transnational Threats Department held a training-of-trainers course for the Moldova Border Police and the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine (SBGS) in Chișinău, Moldova. The event focused on developing the instructional skills of the seven participating border officers so that they may conduct future training within their national services on identifying forged documents and imposters at border crossing points. This is the first joint training-of-trainers course on this topic for the neighbouring participating States.

The OSCE Transnational Threats Department (TNTD) organized a workshop on cyber incident classification for 15 cyber security policy and technical experts from Ukraine, including two women and 13 men. The workshop, held on 29 January, focused on the development and implementation of a national cyber incident classification system, a common scheme for understanding and defining what a cyber incident is, that ensures consistency in crisis management tools and plans.

The OSCE Transnational Threats Department (TNTD) and the Office of the Co-ordinator of OSCE Economic and Environmental Activities (OCEEA), in co-operation with the OSCE Mission to Skopje, delivered a training course on improved interagency co-operation for effective financial investigations on 21 and 22 January.

On 17 and 18 December, the OSCE Transnational Threats Department and the Office of the Co-ordinator of OSCE Economic and Environmental Activities hosted the Tenth Annual General Meeting of the Permanent Conference of Organized Crime Prosecutors (PCOCP) at the Hofburg in Vienna. The event brought together senior prosecutors, judges, legal experts, and representatives from 14 participating States from across Europe and South-Eastern Europe to enhance informal and formal international collaboration against transnational organized crime.

On 17 and 18 December, the OSCE Transnational Threats Department and the OSCE Project Co-ordinator in Uzbekistan held a training course on media and information literacy in preventing and countering violent extremism and radicalization that lead to terrorism (P/CVERLT) in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.