At The Regulatory Review, Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Senior Adjunct Professor of Global Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, examines the gendered gaps in the newly adopted U.N. Cybercrime Convention. While the treaty represents a significant step toward combating cybercrime globally, de Silva de Alwis contends it lacks substantive provisions that specifically protect women from gender-based cyber threats. From cyber-trafficking and intimate image abuse to financial scams and data breaches, women and girls remain uniquely vulnerable in the digital age. She calls for stronger gender-sensitive protections to ensure cyber justice includes those most at risk.
De Silva de Alwis is an elected expert on the treaty body to the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). She also has been appointed to the UN General Assembly President’s Advisory Council on Gender Equality to advise on advancing his priorities on gender equality and women’s empowerment.
From The Regulatory Review:
Cybercrime has increased as technology and its applications have grown. On December 24, 2024, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a treaty entitled “Countering the use of information and communications technologies for criminal purposes.” The treaty is also known as the Cybercrime Convention. The Cybercrime Convention is the first international criminal justice treaty of the 21st century, and the process of its development took five years and included input from stakeholders from both the public and private sectors. At the time of adoption, Philemon Yang, president of the U.N. General Assembly, highlighted the importance of the new Convention:
We live in a digital world, one where information and communications technologies have enormous potential for the development of societies, but also increases the potential threat of cybercrime.
The Preamble to the Convention includes a recognition of the importance of “mainstreaming a gender perspective in all relevant efforts to prevent and combat the offenses covered by this Convention, in accordance with domestic law.” This declaration, however, is not followed up with substantive provisions that could meaningfully strengthen the Convention.
At a time when tech leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg bemoan the reduction in “masculine energy” in corporate culture, it is important to bring gender awareness to the tech world and this first international convention on cyberspace. I will analyze a gender perspective in the context of four types of cybercrime: cyber-trafficking, non-consensual sharing of intimate images, cyber-grooming, and cyber scams.
Original source can be found here.