Cybercrime Legislation in Belgium, Country report of the Cybercrime Section of the IACL Congress in Washington 2010

There has been a progressive incorporation into Belgian law of the instruments to fight and protect against cyber criminality. The first stages, in the nineties, limited themselves mostly to regulating, in dispersed order, the protection of personal data (1992) by integrating in a progressive manner the specificities of computerized handling of data (reforms of 1998 and 2003). The March 21th 1991 Act on the reform of certain economic public enterprises determines the terms which a third person has to observe in order to intercept or monitor data that have been transferred by means of telecommunication, at a time when the means of communication are substantially still in the hands of public enterprises, while at present, as we have already seen, the Belgian judicial authorities have been obliged to open criminal proceedings against YAHOO! In order to have it cooperate in a judicial inquiry, whereas the company, though offering services in Belgium, argued it could not be forced to co-operate directly as the requested data were stocked in the United States. Facing such liberalisation and globalisation of telecommunication, the lawgiver has been coerced to design new tools by defining facts of abuse of domain names (2003), the services of the information society (E-commerce Act - 2003), computer programs (2004), electronic communications (2005 and the reforms of 2009 and 2010) or electronic payments (2005 and 2009).