Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

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> While establishing a basis for "mutual legal assistance", assistance may be denied "if the authorities of the requested State Party would be prohibited by its domestic law from carrying out the action requested with regard to any similar offence, had it been subject to investigation, prosecution or judicial proceedings under their own jurisdiction".

> But: a State Party "shall not decline to act" under the provisions of the freezing, seizure and confiscation of the proceeds of crime "on the ground of bank secrecy". The Convention is expected to be adopted by the end of the year.

So Russia and any other can country can ask for records on any US person they want under a pretext of committing some crime there and unless the US is itself investigating this party then it's allowed? & conversely, if the US tried to do this Russia or any hostile country can just claim they're investigating said persons in crimes? Surely my reading of this is absurd & it's not actually this badly written?

It's particularly telling that it was Russia & China who proposed it in 2017 in the first place.

I think you’re reading it wrong.

Say a foreign law enforcement entity is investigating Mr X, and asking a domestic authority for some information on Mr X.

The treaty says that generally speaking, the domestic authority should provide such assistance.

However, assume that instead another domestic law enforcement entity was asking the domestic authority for information on Mr X, but (under purely domestic jurisdiction) the domestic authority would be prohibited to provide such assistance for some reason (say, due to privacy laws, procedural protections, or so).

Then, the foreign law enforcement entity would not be entitled to the assistance, either.

I don't see how that changes anything I wrote. For example, take Bill Browder - Russia has been continuously harassing this man even getting an Interpol red notice to be issued against him to rendition him to Russia on trumped up charges because he stood up to Putin. So they issue a request to the bank with a validly issued subpeona in Russian courts. Since a bank would have to issue records to a domestic warrant, it'll now have to issue it for a foreign obtained warrant.

You kind of just reworded what I wrote but I don't see how it changes any of the concerns I expressed.

You're making a pretty bold assumption that the US will ratify this. The US does not make a habit of ratifying UN conventions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41222487

> Advocates including the Biden administration said the deal reflects the interests of the U.S. and its allies.

Yeah - that's the scary part. It seems like this has approval of the current administration so either I'm missing something critical about the protections this treaty has or this is really really bad.

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