As the members of the United Nations are engaged in a process of negotiating a new international treaty on “Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes”, they may draw on lessons learnt from the experience of the Convention on Cybercrime over more than twenty years since it was opened for signature in Budapest in 2001.   

To this effect, the Permanent Mission of Romania to the international organisations in Vienna and the Council of Europe joined forces and held a side event during the fourth session of the UN Ad Hoc Committee tasked with negotiating this future treaty. 

The event was opened by Ambassador Stelian Stoian (Romania) and moderated by Cristina Schulman (former Chair of the Cybercrime Convention Committee) and Alexander Seger (Head of Cybercrime Division, Council of Europe). Some 70 participants contributed to the meeting.   

Experts from Australia, Canada, Portugal, Romania and the USA discussed the design of the Convention on Cybercrime that permitted broad acceptance and global impact, including: a narrow criminal justice treaty focusing on a limited list of offences specific to computer systems and data; language focusing on conduct rather than technology or techniques; and strong safeguards limiting the risk of misuse.  

Experts from the Dominican Republic, Ghana and Sri Lanka then identified the key elements that ensured implementation of the Convention in practice, in particular, the interplay between the common standards of the Convention and its Protocols, the follow up and assessments by the Cybercrime Convention Committee and in particular the capacity building by the Cybercrime Programme Office of the Council of Europe (C-PROC) in Romania. 

Cristina Schulman and Alexander Seger concluded that the Convention has proven to work in practice with a global impact; that the more the future UN treaty will follow the concepts and provisions of the Convention on Cybercrime the more it will find acceptance and – by extension – the more it will be consistent with the domestic laws of the majority of UN members; that strong safeguards will be key to preventing misuse, keeping cyberspace free and open and permitting States to join the future treaty; and that comprehensive capacity building and partnerships will be necessary to ensure implementation and application in practice.