What should be the legal approach to cross-border digital crimes?

The digital space in Bangladesh has evolved from a symbol of progress into an unregulated arena increasingly exploited for transnational criminal activity. While the government's push towards digitalisation—across governance, commerce, and infrastructure—is commendable, its rapid implementation, lacking adequate policy oversight, is inadvertently facilitating a darker reality: cross-border cybercrime, digital trafficking of classified materials, child sexual abuse content, and narcotics trading via the dark web.

What is more alarming is the systemic incapacity of our legal and judicial framework to effectively prosecute such offences—particularly when they transcend geographical borders and are concealed behind layers of anonymising technologies such as VPNs, onion routing, and cloud masking. This gap between the legal borders of the state and the borderless nature of the internet has become a national security concern that warrants immediate judicial and legislative introspection.

The cross-border judicial dilemma

The judiciary in Bangladesh operates under a sovereignty-dependent framework. It has jurisdiction within national boundaries but limited authority once the trail of evidence or perpetrators extends beyond borders. This limitation is further compounded in cases of digital crime, which rarely begin and end within a single jurisdiction. A child sexual abuse video—circulated from a server in Eastern Europe, consumed in Dhaka, and paid for via cryptocurrency through a VPN-obscured wallet—could involve five jurisdictions and still evade prosecution due to legal ambiguity.

Read more

Whose job is it to tackle Bangladesh’s growing cybercrime problem?

International instruments such as the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, although ratified by many countries, remain outside Bangladesh's legal framework. The country has yet to sign or domesticate this treaty, leaving it without a cooperative mechanism for mutual legal assistance, joint investigation teams, or timely data exchange with other nations. Consequently, even when Bangladeshi law enforcement identifies an offender using foreign hosting or anonymisation services, the digital forensic trail is often obstructed by procedural red tape and diplomatic inertia.

The emerging crime patron: Anonymous, scalable, and monetised

Today's digital offender is no longer a lone hacker in isolation. Rather, he is a node within a global "crime-as-a-service" ecosystem. Tools for DDoS attacks, zero-day exploits, ransomware kits, and access to stolen databases are now openly traded in underground forums on the dark web. VPNs, bulletproof hosting, and anonymising browsers render apprehension nearly impossible without sophisticated, internationally coordinated forensic strategies.

In Bangladesh, content related to child sexual abuse material, dark web drug transactions, and leaks of classified national security documents has been identified through open-source intelligence (OSINT) channels. Yet such cases are seldom prosecuted to their logical conclusion, due to a combination of jurisdictional deadlocks, the absence of legal frameworks for digital evidence admissibility, and insufficient technical expertise within the judiciary.

Read more

Why are cybercrimes going unpunished?

What must be done

The Budapest Convention on Cybercrime must be ratified and localised. We need to create a national digital justice task force, introduce legislation on digital evidence and admissibility, formulate a forensic data localisation policy. Additionally, we must develop a judicial training academy on digital crimes, establish bilateral cybercrime memoranda of understanding (MoU) with key countries, and strengthen public-private surveillance collaborations.

The scale, sophistication, and international reach of digital crime in Bangladesh is no longer a distant threat; it is a pressing emergency. Our judicial and legislative systems can no longer afford to remain reactive when adversaries operate through real-time encryption, anonymised currencies, and zero-trace infrastructures. Without immediate policy action, our sovereignty in cyberspace risks becoming purely symbolic.

Bangladesh now stands at a digital crossroads. The decision to build a cyber-resilient judiciary, with international reach and forensic agility, must be taken urgently. Otherwise, the next crime will go unpunished, and the next victim unheard.

Tanvir Hassan Zoha is a cybercrime specialist, legal practitioner at the International Crimes Tribunal, and managing director at Backdoor Private Ltd.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

Follow The Daily Star Opinion on Facebook for the latest opinions, commentaries and analyses by experts and professionals. To contribute your article or letter to The Daily Star Opinion, see our guidelines for submission.