On 24 December 2024, UN Member States adopted the UN Cybercrime Convention (United Nations Convention against cybercrime. Strengthening International Cooperation for Combating Certain Crimes Committed by Means of Information and Communications Technology Systems and for the Sharing of Evidence in Electronic form of Serious Crimes) by consensus in the General Assembly. The adoption of this Convention (hereafter ‘UNCC’), hailed as ‘a major victory for multilateralism, marking the first international anti-crime treaty in 20 years’, should have a significant impact on the fight against transnational organised crime and on the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organised Crime (‘UNTOC’). The question of how to bridge the gap between the UNCC and other pre-existing instruments, especially the UNTOC and the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime (hereafter Budapest Convention), was a pressing issue from the outset of the UNCC negotiations. The General Assembly resolution that launched the UNCC negotiations highlighted the need to take ‘into full consideration existing international instruments’. However, many questions remain concerning the relationship between the UNTOC and the UNCC, in particular: To what extent do these two conventions complement each other? Is there a risk of overlap or competition? The aim of this article is to highlight the main links between the UNTOC and the UNCC, and the potential impact of the latter on the former, in light of the many controversies and challenges raised by this new instrument.
Karine Bannelier (2025) studied this question.