Countries adopted a global blueprint to address digitally enabled crime on Saturday at the opening of the 15th United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in Abu Dhabi. The Abu Dhabi Declaration, adopted by acclamation, sets a five-year roadmap for member states to strengthen cooperation on crime prevention and criminal justice.
The Congress, held from September 26 to October 1, is the UN's largest gathering focused on crime prevention and criminal justice. It brings together 97 countries, 33 ministers and 93 speakers. Youth and women's forums preceded the main Congress.
The declaration has 67 initiatives in 18 articles, organised around four areas: crime prevention and resilience; justice and the rule of law; emerging crime threats linked to advanced technology; and innovation and cooperation. It covers organised crime, corruption, human trafficking, cybercrime and drug-related crime. It also calls for stronger international efforts to recover criminal assets.
A central purpose is to respond to the way technology has changed criminal activity. Criminal networks can move money, goods and information across borders at lightning speed. Technology can also expose millions of people to criminal targeting within a fraction of a second. The Congress heard that countries considered very advanced in technology are as vulnerable to organised crime as weaker ones.
The declaration addresses cybercrime and fraud, alongside the criminal exploitation of digital technology. It identifies emerging trends described as 'crime as a service' and 'violence as a service'. Its approach is based on greater coordination between countries, reflecting the cross-border nature of many of the threats under discussion.
Countries also committed themselves to wider use of technology within their own justice systems. The declaration calls for the digitalisation of justice systems and for artificial intelligence to be used in criminal justice responses. It places conditions on that use, identifying human oversight, transparency, due process and data protection as required safeguards.
Those safeguards set a standard for the technological measures contemplated by the roadmap. The declaration links new tools to legal and procedural protections, rather than treating technical capacity as a substitute for them. It does not set out in the available details which artificial intelligence applications will be prioritised or how data-protection standards will be enforced across jurisdictions.
Implementation will depend in part on the voluntary Pledge4Justice initiative. Participating governments are encouraged to announce concrete, time-bound actions on crime prevention and criminal justice through 2031. The declaration does not specify individual national pledges, a budget or resource allocation, detailed timelines for its initiatives, enforcement arrangements, or measures for assessing its impact.
The private sector is participating for the first time as a formal partner in countering organised crime and terrorism. Its inclusion brings businesses into a Congress whose stated focus is international cooperation among governments and criminal justice institutions.
In a video message to delegates, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said: 'Justice cannot be a privilege. It must protect every person, uphold every person's rights and leave no one behind'.
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