The United Nations Committee responsible for overseeing the negotiations of an international cybercrime treaty agreed on 8th August, 2024 to a text which will be formally accepted by the UN General Assembly later this year.
This treaty will become the first global, legally binding instrument on cybercrime, countering the use of information and communications technologies for criminal purposes. It constitutes the culmination of five years of effort by UN Member States, with the input of civil society, academic institutions and the private sector.
The draft convention notes that new technologies have created opportunities for greater scale, speed and scope of crimes, from terrorism to drug trafficking, transnational organised crime, trafficking in persons, migrant smuggling, trafficking in firearms and in cultural property. The document provides tools that will enhance international cooperation, law enforcement efforts, information exchange, technical assistance and capacity-building relating to cybercrime as well as transfer of technology on mutually agreed terms, which will all benefit developing nations such as Barbados.
The draft Convention addresses the criminalisation of illegal access to information and communications technology systems, illegal interception of and interference with electronic data, illegal use of devices, online child sexual abuse, exploitation and grooming, online non-consensual dissemination of intimate images and the laundering of criminal proceeds.
CARICOM negotiated as a group at these meetings during the last three years. The Barbados delegation was comprised at this last two-week meeting of Hon. Edmund Hinkson, S.C., Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Joint Select Parliamentary Committee on the Cybercrime Bill as well as Joseph Koroma, Data Administrator of the Ministry of Industry, Innovation, Science and Technology. They were supported by the Barbados Permanent Mission to the United Nations at New York.
To read the draft convention, click here.