Following the first five ratifications, the Council of Europe’s Cybercrime Convention came into force on July 1, 2004.
Ratification Status as of April 2008
The signing and ratification process for the Cybercrime Convention resulted with 39 Member States (plus the external supporters United States, Canada, South Africa, and Japan and Montenegro) signing and 22 countries (Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, United States of America, and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) ratifying the Convention as of April 2008 out of the potential 50 countries (45 CoE Member States plus the above mentioned external supporters).
The UK government had already signed the Convention but there has not been any official discussion about the ratification or implementation of the CyberCrime Convention. The House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology in its fifth report of 2007 was critical of this and stated that “this is a matter of concern, particularly as among the provisions in the Convention is a requirement that parties should “afford one another mutual assistance to the widest extent possible for the purpose of investigations or proceedings concerning criminal offences related to computer systems and data, or for the collection of evidence in electronic form of a criminal offence (Article 25).”
For further information about the Cybercrime Convention see the following:
- Akdeniz, Y., An Advocacy Handbook for the Non Governmental Organisations: The Council of Europe’s Cyber-Crime Convention 2001 and the additional protocol on the criminalisation of acts of a racist or xenophobic nature committed through computer systems, Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties, December 2003 (revised and updated in August 2007).