IGF 2023 Town Hall #127 Creating Global Standards to Mitigate Cybercrime

The development of information and communication technologies has created new opportunities for cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities in digital systems and networks. As part of the efforts to address this, the United Nations General Assembly has established an open-ended Ad-Hoc Committee to draft a comprehensive international convention on countering the use of ICTs for criminal purposes (Cybercrime Convention).

The Cybercrime Convention can serve to streamline cross-border cooperation in the investigation and prosecution of cybercrimes, prioritise action against gender-based crimes, crimes targeting children, assist developing countries to overcome capacity constraints, and help build crucial alliances between States and multi-stakeholder communities. The Ad-Hoc Committee is supported by stakeholders from non-governmental organisations, academia, civil society, and private organisations. The Centre for Communication Governance (CCG) and Access Now are accredited stakeholders in these negotiations and have been contributing through oral interventions and written inputs at various stages of the negotiations.

In this session, we aim to engage with stakeholders from various perspectives to build a consensus on areas of the Convention that are still under negotiation. In particular, we will discuss the scope of crimes to be covered under the Convention, obligations related to capacity building and technical assistance, inclusion of human rights obligations and provisions on data protection, and the relationship between the Convention and other international and domestic instruments on cybercrime.

Insights gained from the session will also be used in CCG and Access Now’s interventions at the Ad-Hoc Committee process as it works to finalise the text of the Convention. The session will include officers from the Ad Hoc Committee, offering valuable insights to the discussion and taking key learnings from the session to the Committee's processes. This session is also meant to inform the perspectives of other stakeholders present at the discussion, as they continue to engage with the Cybercrime Convention.

We will ensure balanced representation of both online and onsite speakers. The moderators will work together closely to ensure seamless interactions and conversations between participants onsite and online, supported by the IGF digital platform. The online and onsite moderators will work to keep track of questions and comments from the participants, flagging them to speakers and highlighting emerging themes for discussion. Keeping in mind the town hall format of the session, we will dedicate a significant portion of the allotted time towards the participants’ questions and comments.

All our offsite participants will be able to engage with the discussion in a variety of ways - by speaking online, typing questions or comments on the live chat of the IGF platform, a public Google document, and a Miro Board. We will have better interaction between all attendees by encouraging in-person participants to also use these tools.