“The good news here is that after five long years of negotiation, certain basics like making sure countries that sign on and ratify this treaty all have criminal laws on the books for various digital crimes consistently is a huge win,” he said, recalling a case he assisted in where the perpetrator of a series of non-consensual intimate image distributions fled the country to a region where the act was not considered a crime.
“In this scenario, if this convention was in effect, if the country the suspect had fled to had signed on, they would have been required to treat what happened as a crime and hopefully would have cooperated in the investigatation and prosecution of the perpetrator,” he said. “And the victim may have had some measure of justice. Instead, they were left only with the trauma of what happened to them.”
He is pleased that the European Union has decided to support the treaty, since it takes cybercrime seriously while still protecting the fundamental privacy and human rights of its citizens. However, he noted, “I think the key here is to remember each member state has to not just sign on, but has to ratify this treaty in their government and pass or amend laws as required. This is going to take quite some time. As well, nothing in this treaty compromises the judicial or policing processes, so if an authoritarian regime attempts to abuse this convention, western liberal democracies with strong foundations in the rule of law will have checks and balances.”
