New York (AFP)
UN member states opened a two-week meeting yesterday seeking to finalize an international convention to combat cybercrime, but the proposed text is strongly opposed by a group of rights groups and major technology companies.
Work on the UN Convention against Cybercrime began in 2017 when Russian diplomats sent a letter to the UN Secretary-General outlining the framework of the initiative.
Two years later, despite opposition from the United States and Europe, the General Assembly established an intergovernmental committee tasked with drafting the treaty.
At the opening session, the head of the committee, Fawzia Boumaiza Mbarki, said, “We are at the entrance to the port, and on Friday, August 9, we will dock.” She noted that after seven rounds of negotiations, “differences still exist,” with criticism mounting.
While the revised draft included “welcome improvements,” according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, concerns remain “about significant shortcomings, with many provisions falling short of international human rights standards.”
“These shortcomings are particularly problematic against the backdrop of the widespread use of existing cybercrime laws,” the commission said in an analysis, sometimes in a way that “unjustifiably restricts freedom of expression,” “targets dissent,” or constitutes “arbitrary interference with the privacy and anonymity of communications.”
But critics of the text say it claims too broad an impact.
“It really looks like a global monitoring treaty that would address all crimes,” said Tirana Hassan, executive director of Human Rights Watch.
The 40-country Freedom on the Net Coalition said the treaty “could be misused as a tool for domestic and cross-border repression and other human rights abuses.”
Discussions over the draft have united groups that usually have contradictory positions, with human rights organizations siding with tech giants such as Microsoft, which said in a written report that “no result is better than a bad result.”
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