UN Passes Draft Convention against Cybercrime with Controversial Provisions

TapTechNews August 13th news, on the afternoon of August 8 local time in the US, the United Nations Ad Hoc Committee on Cybercrime unanimously voted to pass the Draft United Nations Convention against Cybercrime.

The deadline for signing the draft convention is December 31, 2026, and it will be submitted to the United Nations General Assembly for voting in autumn. With the same voting countries as before, it is expected that this treaty will be smoothly passed in the United Nations General Assembly. If passed, this Convention will become the world's first legal document to combat crimes in cyberspace.

The draft Convention has for the first time established a legal framework for combating cybercrime and supporting related data access at the global level, jointly combating cybercrime and promoting transnational data exchange, which is of great significance to the development of international law in cyberspace.

This treaty was first proposed by Russia and China in 2017, aiming to strengthen international cooperation to combat certain crimes committed using information and communication technology systems and to share electronic forms of evidence of serious crimes.

TapTechNews learned from the report that the most notable point of this Convention is that the cybercrime convention finally determined by the United Nations will give the government greater surveillance rights, allow extensive sharing of personal data among member states, and require member states to criminalize money laundering and cybercrime, which will lead to the criminalization of hacking attacks, whistleblowing and security research.

The Convention will also override the bank secrecy system. It requires member states to provide records of the government, banks, finance, companies or enterprises, as well as to identify and track the proceeds of crime and recover the proceeds of crime on behalf of the requesting state.

Human rights organizations and large technology companies have expressed concerns about some provisions of this Convention, believing that some texts of the Convention do not fully protect human rights and may lead to an increase in surveillance behavior and a decrease in public trust in digital technology.