No Binding Treaty, No Justice: Cybercriminals Thrive Where International Law Collapses -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

One of the prominent descriptions of cybercrime is that it is a borderless threat. That part is true. What it will not come out and say, because that is too humiliating for its own good, is the slightly more embarrassing truth: That while hackers are certainly a cut above your average criminal today (how cosmopolitan they must feel!) global cybercrime flourishes precisely on account of international law remaining politically divided up by foreign troops with drone support open for business brutish goons and cheap cool airfare compatible technologies jurisdictionally timid in every continent except North America widespread structural obsolescence. The zero day never killed civil society. There was no fight to build a legal order worthy of it.

Every single time there is a significant attack by ransomware, every cross-border breach of data, every hacking syndicate tolerated and permitted support by state shows out the same outrage. Criminal networks act globally, move at the speed of light, hide in spite of different jurisdictions and exploit gaps in sovereignty by weaponizing legal asymmetry. States, in the meantime, still respond via a patchwork of bilateral requests for relatively limited treaties that partially cooperate but politicize bigger issues while muddling through an outdated extradition system from another time and pace. Not a serious architecture of justice A museum of nostalgia for the law.

The Budapest Convention is frequently referenced as evidence of international engagement. But that is exactly the issue it has done, and then pretended whatever activity was sufficient. A convention which is not genuinely global, universally ratified, and that does not have a single binding cutting across law to enforce a high degree of uniformity on its own (and since every time the government changes) cannot carry these pillars we put upon it now. Something is better than nothing, for sure. Least-worst is a sad place to be when hospitals are paralyzed by ransomware, financial systems hacked into from afar, children raped via online prostition and entire populations suffer under industrial-strength digital predation.

That is where it starts to really become unbearable in the face of hypocrisy, though. The topic of cybercrime is discussed by governments as a shared belief in their common victimhood, but far too many still consider cross-border judicial cooperation to merely be an optional political convenience. They desire the rewards of global enforcement without paying for mutual legal surrender. They cry sovereignty when cooperation gets uncomfortable, and breath global solidarity post breach. In practice, this means only one lenient jurisdiction; only one uncooperative state; or extradition dead end to convert accountability into a fairy tale for cybercriminals.

And that is the strategic advantage of digital crime in a world constructed by an analog-law society. Criminals do not require global consensus. They need fragmentation. They do not require the protection of every state All they need is enough legal disunity to maintain mobility, invisibility or avoid attack. Sovereignty, for the modern hacker (whether they know it or not), is a brutal truth that far too many policymakers continue to elide. It can become infrastructure for impunity in cyberspace.

The consequences are not abstract. Cybercriminals do not just steal information with attacks on hospitals, utilities, banks and courts or by hacking public databases. They are coercing societies. They are breaking care, dismantling trust, and centralizing institutional inertia. Yet the international legal response continues to act as though technical complexity was at the centre of things, not cowardice. The question is no longer whether cybercrime presents a threat that merits greater worldwide cooperation amongst governments. The thing is why this coordination still exists so weak despite such a blatant evidence.

Impossible to secure more robust international treaty norms without having wrestled with the fear of interference, regional bias or power abuse in transnational enforcement? Those concerns are real. But the only other option is not liberty. The alternative is a world where the absence of legal unity becomes part and parcel of criminal enterprise. A global framework that is weak does not shield the most vulnerable from overreach: it leaves them increasingly exposed to predators who know how much better than any diplomat, international incoherence can be managed.

Perhaps the most dangerously misleading illusion in cyber governance today is that voluntary alignment, light cooperation and targeted ratification are a satisfactory substitute for binding legal architecture. They cannot. Mature crime syndicates do not scare; soft law. Ransomware cartels are not deterred by diplomatic goodwill. The practice of extradition is fragmented, and actors who purposely place themselves in jurisdictions where cooperation becomes politically unappealing or legally impossible are not deterred by it.

The world needs to forgo its sweet talking. Without such an international agreement that is truly binding, widely accepted and operationally credible there will be no serious global justice against cybercrime. Until such a way exists, leaders should avoid talking as if they are defending some kind of rules based order in cyberspace. What, too often, they are defending is a false legalistic façade, comforting to conference goers and filling communiqués while abandoning its victims.

This collapse was not created by cybercriminals. All they did was you know learning how to capitalize off of it. And so long as international law is a patchwork where digital crime has bought and paid for rigorous consistency, justice will remain slow, partial strikingly unserious.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law Unversity 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia