UN approves Russia-backed ‘cybercrime’ treaty that America and Western powers say will censor the internet
The United Nations on Friday approved a Russian-led bid that aims to create a new convention on cybercrime, alarming rights groups and Western powers that fear a bid to restrict online freedom.
The General Assembly approved the resolution sponsored by Russia and backed by China, which would set up a committee of international experts in 2020.
The panel will work to set up “a comprehensive international convention on countering the use of information and communications technologies for criminal purposes,” the resolution said.
The United States, European powers and rights groups fear that the language is code for legitimizing crackdowns on expression, with numerous countries defining criticism of the government as “criminal.”
China heavily restricts internet searches to avoid topics sensitive to its communist leadership, as well as news sites with critical coverage.
A number of countries have increasingly tried to turn off the internet, with India cutting off access in Kashmir in August after it stripped autonomy to the Muslim-majority region and Iran taking much of the country offline as it cracked down on protests in November.
“It is precisely our fear that (a new convention) would allow the codification at an international and global level of these types of controls that’s driving our opposition and our concerns about this resolution,” a US official said.
U.S. deputy ambassador Cherith Norman Chalet told the assembly before the vote that “this resolution will undermine international cooperation to combat cyber-crime at a time when enhanced coordination is essential.”
“There is no consensus among member states on the need or value of drafting a new treaty,” she said. “It will only serve to stifle global efforts to combat cybercrime.”
Chalet and the Finnish representative speaking for the European Union both stressed that the U.N.´s existing intergovernmental expert group on cybercrime is already tackling the question of whether a new treaty is needed.
“Ït is wrong to make a political decision on a new treaty before cybercrime experts can give their advice,” Chalet said, adding that the resolution “prejudges” and “will undermine” the experts´ work.
Russia´s representative underscored that the resolution requires that the new committee must take into account the results of the work of the expert group on cybercrime, expected next year, which Moscow supports.
Taking that into account, the Russian representative said substantive work on the new convention will begin in 2021.