After three years of negotiations, the UN has announced work has finished on a draft text of the Convention Against Cyber-crime. The draft, agreed by the Ad Hoc Committee on Cyber-crime, is expected to be adopted by the General Assembly later this year, marking it as the first globally agreed framework for tackling cyber-crime.

With the new laws, the UN hopes to  improve international cooperation, establish common practice among law enforcement, provide technical assistance, and help with capacity building. If agreed by the General Assembly, the convention will be used to target the use of technology that can facilitate firearm and drug trafficking, terrorism, and other transnational crimes.

However, the draft text has come under fire from opponents across civil-society, including NGOs, policy experts, human rights advocates, and tech companies, who warn that overly broad language could give authoritarian regimes the opportunity to stifle political opposition and violate human rights.

Those rejecting the draft point to Articles 28-30 which allows member states the power to search and seize electronic data, collect and record real-time traffic data, and track communications, as long as they believe it is being used to perpetrate serious organised crime.

Although the treaty is designed to tackle cyber-criminals’ adoption of new technology, critics point out that some member states have already tried to mould the new laws for their own nefarious purposes. For example, at the New York negotiating session to agree on the draft text, Iran forced seven rounds of voting aiming to remove the existing human rights safeguards.

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Deborah Brown, deputy technology and rights director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The global cybercrime treaty that the UN has now adopted will be a disaster for the human rights of people around the world.

“Member countries have created an unprecedented surveillance tool without adequate safeguards. The treaty will effectively be a legal instrument of repression against journalists, activists, and others across the world’s borders.”

Writing in a blog post, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime highlighted that the draft convention contains no measures for legal training or judicial oversight of electronic evidence collection, and fails to clearly define how member states should properly use electronic data in building legal cases while protecting personal data security.

Taken together, it argues that the treaty has ‘built-in unintended consequences’, and recommends that governments more closely evaluate the potential impacts of Articles 28–30, and elevate safeguarding measures.