FIJI’S Acting Director of Public Prosecutions, Nancy Tikoisuva, has warned that the country’s laws are racing to catch up with a digital world where phones, smart devices, metadata, and artificial intelligence can become evidence or instruments of crime.
Tikoisuva said prosecutors and judges are now being forced to navigate a legal system built for a different era.
“The law is not stagnant. It is evolving, and it will evolve as society changes, as community changes, as social interactions change,” she said during the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) event.
Her central message was blunt: the online world is no longer separate from the courtroom.
“Your home includes also your phones, your laptops, electronic communication,” she said, adding that smart devices now hold “valuable information and potentially evidence.”
She pointed to smart TVs, watches, rings, cameras and even household appliances as sources of data that may be seized in criminal investigations.
Tikoisuva said Fiji’s Criminal Procedure Act covers search and seizure, while the Cybercrime Act targets computer-related offences including unauthorised access, interception of data, forgery, extortion, fraud and identity theft.
“If you go and hack into the system,” she said, or use a password “without the permission of the owner,” the law is designed to respond.
She also underlined the growing role of metadata and digital forensics, describing how altered photos, deleted files and stored records can become decisive in court.
Recalling the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard defamation litigation, she said the case showed how “metadata in that photo” could help expose manipulation.
“When a photo is created, there is an electronic footprint,” she said.
One of her warnings concerned Fiji’s Online Safety Act, which she said now criminalises conduct that had previously been treated as a civil matter.
“Before it was just a civil remedy,” she said of defamation.
“This law (current law) now criminalises that behaviour, meaning you can get charged and you can go to prison for it.”
She said the law also covers causing harm through electronic communication and the posting of intimate visual recordings.
Tikoisuva said the test for harm is the impact on the recipient, not the sender’s intent. The law, she said, looks for whether a post or message causes “serious emotional distress.” In practice, that has meant taking account of victims who describe counselling, school fallout, isolation and suicidal thoughts after harmful online posts.
Her warning was aimed squarely at younger users. “Be careful,” she said.
“Something that you would not say to the person to their face, don’t do it on social media because there are laws in place that will touch you.”
She added: “Don’t trust another person with your screenshots.”
Tikoisuva said the next frontier is organised crime, which increasingly uses encrypted apps, cryptocurrency and virtual assets.
“If we can’t touch the criminals, we can touch the assets,” she said. But she warned that when digital assets are held offshore, recovery becomes much harder.
“Fiji’s courts, the internet is no longer a separate space. It is evidence, conduct, and, increasingly, the crime scene.”
