The latest draft of the UN Cybercrime Treaty has raised serious concerns among human rights organisations. In its current form, the treaty risks criminalising expression and dissent, creating extensive surveillance powers, and facilitating cross-border repression – with particularly stringent consequences for activists, journalists, human rights defenders, women, and LGBTQI* individuals.
It is important to note that the proposed cybercrime treaty is not unique in the threat that it poses to marginalised groups. Indeed, feminist organisations have already identified distinct patterns of exploitation related to existing cybercrime laws and frameworks and the ways in which they can be abused to restrict fundamental rights, freedoms, and civil liberties. However, while there is an increasing awareness of this pattern in the international community, anti-feminist actors continue to perpetuate a narrative that characterises technology (and the legislation around it) as an “objective” or “neutral” issue, particularly in multilateral spaces. This narrative dismisses the relevance of rights-based language and appropriate gender mainstreaming in policy documents and obstructs critical dialogue regarding the relationship between social identities and the experiences of individuals online.
Together with the Heinrich-Böll Foundation in Vienna, CFFP is implementing a project that aims to analyse the impact of anti-gender or authoritarian actors on the regulation of cybercrime. Ultimately, the project seeks to centre the experiences of those most impacted by punitive cybercrime legislation in order to counter harmful rhetoric and advocate for the inclusion of feminist perspectives in any attempts to regulate technology and digital rights.