Speech-Related Offenses Should be Excluded from the Proposed UN Cybercrime Treaty

Governments should protect people against cybercrime, and they should equally respect and protect people's human rights. However, across the world, governments routinely abuse cybercrime laws to crack down on human rights by criminalizing speech. Governments claim they must do so to combat disinformation, “religious, ethnic or sectarian hatred,” “rehabilitation of nazism,” or “the distribution of false information,” among other harms. But in practice they use these laws to suppress criticism and dissent, and to more broadly clamp down on the …

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