UN approves landmark controversial cybercrime treaty

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United Nations Ad Hoc Committee on Cybercrime Officially recognized India on Thursday (August 8) signed the first-ever treaty aimed at combating cybercrime, but the controversial text has been opposed by digital rights groups and big tech companies.

Convention on Combating Cybercrime Initiated Russia proposed the deal in 2017, and it has moved forward despite opposition from the European Union and the United States.

negotiation take The text, which had been delayed for three years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, aims to strengthen global efforts to combat cybercrime, particularly in areas such as child sexual abuse imagery and money laundering.

The convention will be voted on at the UN General Assembly in the fall and will come into force once it is ratified by at least 40 UN member states.

The convention could become the first international treaty on cybercrime. Already a party All other countries except Ireland have signed but not yet ratified the 2001 Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, which was negotiated within the framework of the Council of Europe.

Deborah Brown, deputy director of Human Rights Watch warn X said UN member states adopted the convention despite “stern warnings” from leading human rights experts, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, more than 100 non-governmental organizations and industry.

“It’s unfortunate that (the treaty) was only passed today.” Nick Ashton-Hart Written on XHe is the head of the Cybersecurity Technology Agreement delegation, representing more than 100 technology companies including HP, Meta and Microsoft. Second post “The delegates failed to address a single one of the deficiencies identified by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.”

NGOs and big tech companies worry the treaty could be abused as a tool for state surveillance.

“This treaty is effectively a legal tool of repression,” Brown said. According to reports AFPBecause “it can be used across borders to crack down on journalists, activists, LGBT people, free thinkers, etc.”

Crucial to concerns about abuse by authoritarian regimes, the provision allows a country to demand from foreign authorities any electronic evidence of a crime that is punishable by at least four years in prison under domestic law. Countries can also demand data from internet service providers.

Instead, Iran sought to remove several provisions guaranteeing fundamental freedoms before the convention was adopted on Thursday, but their efforts were decisively rejected in a series of landslide votes.

One clause Iran sought to remove was: “Nothing in this Convention may be interpreted as permitting the suppression of human rights or fundamental freedoms,” such as “freedom of expression, conscience, opinion, religion or belief.”

The request was rejected by 102 votes against to 23 in favor, with votes in favor coming from India, Libya, North Korea, Russia, Sudan, Syria and Venezuela.

The Russian Federation said: “We fully share the position of the delegations of Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Vietnam and Mauritania that the treaty is overloaded with human rights guarantees.” wrote Although the country has long been a supporter of the convention, in a July 30 document it said it would stop adhering to it.

It argued that these safeguards “could lead to some countries taking excessive advantage of the opportunity to deny legal aid requests.”

After years of negotiations, member states of the Ad Hoc Committee on Cybercrime unanimously supported the text.

(Editing by Rajnish Singh)