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A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

Last week, the government announced that Canada has signed the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime, with Ministers Anita Anand, Gary Anandasangaree and Sean Fraser touting the treaty’s child protection provisions and human rights safeguards, which were described as “among the strongest found in an international criminal justice treaty.” The announcement, released in mid-July with few paying attention, left out much of the story. The reality is that the convention is not primarily a cybercrime treaty at all, but rather a sweeping cross-border surveillance and electronic evidence-sharing agreement that Canada originally opposed, that leading human rights groups and twenty Canadian organizations and experts urged the government to reject, and that key allies have thus far declined to sign. While signing the convention does not create binding obligations (that requires ratification), the decision to sign a treaty that the government declined to sign at the official ceremony less than a year ago raises troubling questions. This post seeks to answer three of them: what is this treaty, what are the risks, and what, if anything, changed in the last nine months?

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