Today, EFF joined a coalition of civil society organizations in urging UN Member States not to sign the UN Convention Against Cybercrime. For those that move forward despite these warnings, we urge them to take immediate and concrete steps to limit the human rights harms this Convention will unleash. These harms are likely to be severe and will be extremely difficult to prevent in practice.
The Convention obligates states to establish broad electronic surveillance powers to investigate and cooperate on a wide range of crimes—including those unrelated to information and communication systems—without adequate human rights safeguards. It requires governments to collect, obtain, preserve, and share electronic evidence with foreign authorities for any “serious crime”—defined as an offense punishable under domestic law by at least four years’ imprisonment (or a higher penalty).
In many countries, merely speaking freely; expressing a nonconforming sexual orientation or gender identity; or protesting peacefully can constitute a serious criminal offense per the definition of the convention. People have faced lengthy prison terms, or even more severe acts like torture, for criticizing their governments on social media, raising a rainbow flag, or criticizing a monarch.
In today’s digital era, nearly every message or call generates granular metadata—revealing who communicates with whom, when, and from where—that routinely traverses national borders through global networks. The UN cybercrime convention, as currently written, risks enabling states to leverage its expansive cross-border data-access and cooperation mechanisms to obtain such information for political surveillance—abusing the Convention’s mechanisms to monitor critics, pressure their families, and target marginalized communities abroad.
As abusive governments increasingly rely on questionable tactics to extend their reach beyond their borders—targeting dissidents, activists, and journalists worldwide—the UN Cybercrime Convention risks becoming a vehicle for globalizing repression, enabling an unprecedented multilateral infrastructure for digital surveillance that allows states to access and exchange data across borders in ways that make political monitoring and targeting difficult to detect or challenge.
EFF has long sounded the alarm over the UN Cybercrime Treaty’s sweeping powers of cross-border cooperation and its alarming lack of human-rights safeguards. As the Convention opens for signature on October 25–26, 2025 in Hanoi, Vietnam—a country repeatedly condemned by international rights groups for jailing critics and suppressing online speech—the stakes for global digital freedom have never been higher.
The Convention’s many flaws cannot easily be mitigated because it fundamentally lacks a mechanism for suspending states that systematically fail to respect human rights or the rule of law. States must refuse to sign or ratify the Convention.
Read our full letter here.
