Parliamentarians of the Union State of Belarus and Russia continue interaction in the area of information security

At a meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union State’s standing seminar on building the Belarus-Russia Union State, Sergei Pospelov, Executive Secretary of the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly and head of the CSTO PA Secretariat, made a speech titled Current State and Main Development Areas of Information Security of the Union State Against Modern Challenges and Threats.
The CSTO PA Executive Secretary stated that in the 21st century the traditional challenges and threats to global security have shifted to cyberspace, bringing a dangerous imbalance into international cooperation at the level of countries and regions.
“Information aggression, distortion of real events and trampling of historical truth have become tools of certain states. One of their aims is to drive a wedge between the Slavic peoples and confuse the allies and partners of Belarus and Russia,” said Sergei Pospelov.
In his view, this threat is a reflection of destructive attempts to question and destroy the international security architecture in an attempt to preserve the illusion of a unipolar world order.
“These actions clearly pose a real threat to the many years of stable development of integration processes in Greater Eurasia. It is more important than ever for parliamentarians to unite and increase their efforts to provide legislative support to collective and national security in order to reliably protect sovereignty through law,” said the CSTO PA Executive Secretary.
In his address, he highlighted the threats that accompany the digitalization of governance, economy and public life, noting the growing risks to key sectors of national security, including defence and the economy.
“Destructive followers of such a line have long viewed the information environment as a likely battleground in a new cold and hot war, along with the militarization of outer space, the ecological and biological environment,” stressed Sergei Pospelov.
The Executive Secretary noted the particular danger of focused influence on the sociopolitical and socioeconomic environment in Eurasia. “Using the Internet, emissaries of all stripes are trying to spread propaganda, finance militants and hire recruits for nationalist organizations and illegal armed groups. All these approaches of common terrorism are repeated on an international scale.”
At the same time, “pro-Western Internet resources, together with NGOs, raise the wave of Russophobia and use network technologies to destabilize the situation in the Union State and other CSTO and CIS member states,” said Sergei Pospelov, noting that “information pressure from the outside is both overtly or covertly aimed at interfering in electoral processes, disrupting state power and changing the constitutional order in states that are out of favour, as evidenced by the recent events in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Russia.”
“Countering this destructive influence should become one of the priority areas of lawmaking in both the CSTO PA and the Union State,” said Sergei Pospelov, welcoming the Union State of Belarus and Russia’s use of the CSTO PA’s many years of successful experience in model lawmaking.
He noted the following advantages of using model laws:
– Full-fledged implementation of model legal acts opens the way to the creation of a common legal space;
– The process of creating model instruments is truly democratic, based on the search for consensus and best legal forms;
– Joint lawmaking makes it possible to more fully utilize the possibilities of acting proactively and to take into account security trends systematically, at the level of the state, national economy, society and the individual.
As an example of a systemic approach, he pointed to the international cooperative response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It is clear that with legal norms on biosecurity that had been prepared and adopted in advance, the negative economic consequences of closing borders and imposing local lockdowns could have been avoided or greatly reduced,” the CSTO PA Executive Secretary is convinced.
He recalled that CSTO Parliamentary Assembly’s legislative support of information security includes formalized protection of critical information infrastructure facilities from cyberattacks to increase operational stability; intellectual property, big data and personal information storage; and regulation of cryptoasset circulation, which is being worked on in close cooperation with the Federal Financial Monitoring Service and other competent authorities of the CSTO Member States.
Overall, the CSTO model legal acts in this area are designed to bring together the legal principles of combating the illegal use of Internet technologies, fighting terrorism and extremism, organized crime, corruption and other interrelated negative factors.
“We view the Parliamentary Assembly’s lawmaking as a contribution to the creation of universal and just rules of responsible behaviour for all states, including the prevention of conflicts in the information space and the issues of using artificial intelligence,” Sergei Pospelov stressed.
He noted that the potential for cooperation between the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union State of Belarus and Russia is far from exhausted and can be deepened, in particular, due to the introduction of the partnership institution in the CSTO PA. “The Parliamentary Assembly of the Union State starts developing model legislation, and in future it could propose model acts to the CSTO PA as well,” the CSTO PA Executive Secretary said.