The promise and peril of the U.N. Convention Against Cybercrime

At the end of October, 72 countries signed the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime in Hanoi, Vietnam. The Convention is the first comprehensive global treaty on this matter, providing states with a range of measures to prevent and combat cybercrime and to strengthen international cooperation in sharing electronic evidence for serious crimes. While many others are expected to join in due course, with 121 U.N. members yet to accede — and the fact that signatories are only legally bound by the treaty once they ratify it — the new U.N. instrument has a long way to go before it achieves universal acceptance.

The process for negotiating a U.N. cybercrime treaty was born in controversy. The initial push for the Convention came from Russia, the largest perpetrator of cybercrime, and the resolution tabled in 2019 to launch negotiations received only minority support. The motivation behind the decade-long pursuit was to replace the Budapest Convention as the most recognised international standard and advance a treaty that would better reflect the ideas of state-controlled internet governance. After close to three years of negotiations, an overwhelming number of stakeholders viewed the final document as flawed, due to state overreach married with weak safeguards, and many civil society organizations have called on countries to reject it.

Despite these hurdles, the text was adopted by consensus in the Ad Hoc Committee tasked with elaborating the treaty and later confirmed in the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA), in what has been hailed a victory for multilateralism. Thanks to the external voices across civil society, the technology industry, and academia that participated in negotiations, the outcome was a more balanced text compared to the initial Russian proposal.

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