Canada must reject adoption of the United Nations draft Convention against Cybercrime

The United Nations draft Convention against Cybercrime will be voted on at the UN General Assembly on December 17 and will be open for signatures next year. It is essential that Canada vote against it and, if passed, refuse to sign it.

Despite its name, the Convention against Cybercrime will have the effect of undermining cybersecurity.  It will subvert human rights on a global scale, constrain Canada’s ability to act in its own interest and the interest of the people of Canada, and place Canadians, including our diaspora communities, at greater risk of harm from extraterritorial human rights abuses.

In a joint statement issued today by nine organizations, including the Centre for Free Expression, and eleven individuals, the dangers of the draft Convention and the reasons Canada should refuse to adopt it are laid out in detail. 

The treaty creates a powerful global policing tool through which any country will be able to request surveillance of Canadians in the absence of sufficient safeguards against abuse. It requires states to adopt a number of criminal offences, intrusive surveillance powers, and exceedingly broad cross-border law enforcement cooperation mechanisms. Accompanying these requirements are weak safeguards which too frequently defer to national preference and generally lack any meaningful operational mechanisms.

By failing to incorporate clear safeguards, the draft treaty jeopardizes security researchers, who have faced legal threats and prosecution for legitimate efforts to expose security vulnerabilities, and it allows public interest whistleblowers to be threatened and prosecuted.

The failure to incorporate effective human rights safeguards is indicative of a serious division that shaped negotiations of the draft Convention at the United Nations, and has drawn criticism from a broad array of stakeholders including human rights groups, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, members of the United States Senate, large tech companies and industry initiatives, and over 120 of the world’s leading cybersecurity researchers

As expressed in the joint statement, the  draft Convention fails to clearly articulate the core harm it seeks to address, giving license to a problematic trend where states use cybercrime regimes to label any online conduct a “cybercrime”.

Given its expansive scope, the draft Convention is on course to become a powerful tool for authoritarian governments that would abuse its broad surveillance and cross-border cooperation mechanisms to expand their targeting, intimidation, and silencing of political opponents, activists, and human rights defenders.

More than one out of every five people living in Canada was born in another country.  Canada is home to many refugees from around the world and has welcomed over a million refugees since 1980. Canada has an obligation to anticipate risks and protect people in Canada—including refugees, human rights defenders, activists, and journalists—from the rights violations caused by foreign interference and transnational repression.

As noted in the joint statement, historically, Canada has learned hard lessons from past failures to adequately heed the danger of cooperation with foreign governments without taking adequate measures to safeguard human rights. Canadian authorities have witnessed first-hand the tragic and horrific consequences that inappropriate data sharing with foreign authorities can inflict on innocent persons. Even the informal sharing of inappropriate or inaccurate information can lead to the rendition and torture of innocent persons, as in the case of Maher Arar—a Canadian citizen who was arrested in the United States and rendered to Syria where he was subjected to torture and inhumane treatment.

In the face of these shortcomings, Canada should reject a treaty that would undermine human rights around the world, and expose people living in Canada, their families abroad, and most of the world’s population to an expanding array of dangers involving surveillance and repression. It should encourage other countries to join it in rejecting this deeply flawed treaty.