EU – Baltic States, Forum, Legislation, Security, Technology

Dr Katrin Suder, the State Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Defence of Germany emphasised in her opening speech the growing importance of cyber defence for the military and advocated a deeper cooperation between security and business sector within Europe. „Cyber defence is definitely a team-sport,” said Dr. K.Suder in her opening speech.

“We have to break some common myths about the cyber defence in order to adapt to the contemporary security environment: First of all, cyber defence is not only subject of technical matters. It is primarily a strategic issue. Cyber-attacks affect policies, industry, and business decision and require relevant policies in place. Second of all, to fight cyber-attacks, to build a defence fortress, it is crucial to see the big picture. Every cyber-attack on state systems takes place in greater context – either if it accompanies an interstate conflict, a terrorist attack, a state collapse, failure of national government, it will always have a deeper root cause” stressed Jānis Sārts, the State Secretary of the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Latvia during his keynote address.

As reported before, the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Latvia aims to present conclusions and proposals from the conference to the EU Member States and relevant EU bodies for further enhancing cyber defence in Europe. It is expected that the conference and its findings will decisively enrich the respective debates on this relatively new topic within the EU.

As cyber issues are taking an increasingly greater role in today’s security agenda, the Latvian Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the first half of 2015 has set Digital Europe as one of three policy priorities. Cyber security and defence form an inherent part of this priority.

The conference “Cyber Defence in Europe” took place on March 25-26 in Berlin, Germany and was organized by the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Latvia and the Federal Ministry of Defence of Germany. Cyber defence matters were discussed in four panels – Implications of the EU`s Cyber Defence Policy Framework, the EU`s Mutual Defence and Solidarity Clause in the Cyber Context, Cyber Defence in EU Military Operations, as well as Civil-Military Cooperation in Cyber Defence.