Inclusive cybercrime policymaking: an online training programme for civil society

This session will provide the conceptual foundations necessary to understand the phenomenon of cybercrime and the legal frameworks to counter it. It will also consider how ideological differences over the internet, cyberspace, power, and control can influence national approaches in conceptualizing cybercrime and in developing regulations and policies.  

This session will introduce participants to the challenges posed by the transnational nature of cybercrime and the importance of understanding jurisdictional challenges in policy and law making. It will delve into some of the key existing regional instruments such as the Budapest Convention, and other regional initiatives and explore the challenges of transposition of regional and international instruments into national law.

This session will discuss the function of substantive criminal law, national and international approaches to the criminalization of acts in cyberspace, and related human rights concerns. It will show how the laws can deviate from widely accepted international standards related to cybercrime and human rights and lead to human rights abuses. This session will also look at some of the recent proposals brought to the UN cybercrime process and discuss their possible human rights implications.

This session will focus on digital investigation and the key issues and challenges from two perspectives: legal and practical. The first part will introduce of the concepts of digital investigations, mutual legal assistance, and emerging legal frameworks for access to computer data in the context of human rights. The second part will allow participants to get acquainted with the problems of digital investigations from the law enforcement perspective and learn about the challenges of accessing data in criminal investigations based on real-life scenarios.

This session will introduce participants to the new UN cybercrime process, its political background and discuss ways in which civil society individuals and groups can engage.

This session aims to provide a better understanding of how international frameworks and policy discussions on combatting cybercrime and promoting responsible state behaviour in the use of ICTs may be better leveraged for coherent responses. It will increase awareness of how the two topics intersect, of existing commitments at the UN level and of concrete recommendations for better collaboration to help address criminal use of ICTs that may threaten international peace and security.  

This session will introduce participants to the gendered aspects of cybercrime in relation to the acts and impacts, and the implications for embedding gender into policies and legal frameworks including, but not limited to, cyber-enabled crimes. This session will also consider cyber-dependent crimes that appear to be predominantly conducted by males – for example hacking and other computer misuse offences – which resemble the general gender imbalance in offending. 

This session will introduce participants to public key encryption, its benefits to commerce and human rights, and trends towards privacy-enhancing technologies. Highlighting the tensions between privacy and strong encryption, this session will explore key themes such as access to encrypted content and ‘going dark’ claims by law enforcement.