10
Strategy are improving communication, empowering citizens, and
encouraging democratic participation. Citizens in community visits
conducted by the Maitlamo Project Team expressed a desire to learn
more about government.
¾ The Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act recognises intellectual
property rights in computer software, electronic documents and other
forms of data. Concerns were expressed, however, about the
adequacy of remedies and enforcement. There is also no legislative
protection against cyber-squatting on a website and no dispute
resolution system in place to deal with domain name protection.
There is also no appropriate legislated limitation on the liability of
Internet Service Providers.
¾ Transparency of the legal system and legal decision-making can be
improved by making more information, including the legislation of
Botswana and judicial and administrative decisions, available on the
Internet. These elements of transparency are related to eGovernment. As well, there is considerable scope for the adoption of
ICT technologies in the legal system, including case management of
the courts and training of legal and judicial officials in the use of
new information technologies.
4.5
The Legal and Policy e-Readiness Report and Gap Analysis identified
four immediate priorities for legislative and legal policy development.
These priorities were developed taking into account reports of other
Task Forces and took into consideration that the Legal and Policy Task
Force had been charged with identifying changes that are required to
enable the development of an ICT Strategy for Botswana. In addition to
the policy development that is underway regarding telecommunications
liberalisation (which may include spectrum allocation and
convergence—information was not available to confirm this) and
competition policy, the short-term priorities are:
¾
Media-neutral legislation to deal with electronic documents (ecommerce legislation).
¾
Amendments to specific legislation including the Criminal
Procedure and Evidence Act, the Authentication of Documents Act, the
Foreign Documents Evidence Act and possibly selected other legislation
(e.g., the Botswana Stock Exchange Act) to allow for the use and
enforcement of electronic documents.
¾
Development of a policy and possibly legislation to deal with
electronic signatures.