Global Cybercrime and Digital Jurisdiction: Rethinking Criminal Law and International Legal Cooperation

Abstract

Cybercrime increasingly operates through infrastructures, offenders, victims, digital platforms, and evidence repositories distributed across several national jurisdictions, challenging the territorial assumptions embedded in conventional criminal law.
Recent mechanisms for cross-border electronic evidence have improved international cooperation, yet substantial fragmentation remains between jurisdictional doctrine, digital-forensic practice, service-provider compliance, evidentiary admissibility, and algorithmic attribution.
This study identifies a research gap in the absence of an integrated and legally auditable framework capable of assessing jurisdictional claims together with the reliability of AI-assisted cybercrime attribution and cross-border evidence acquisition. To address this gap, the research conceptualizes a Jurisdiction–Evidence–Attribution Framework (JEAF) for evaluating cyber incidents through territorial nexus, evidentiary accessibility, international cooperation requirements, attribution confidence, procedural safeguards, and conflict-of-law risk.
The proposed approach treats digital jurisdiction not as a single geographical determination but as a multidimensional decision problem involving offenders, victims, infrastructure, data controllers, cloud locations, investigative authorities, and applicable procedural laws.
Particular attention is given to emerging developments including the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime, the Second Additional Protocol to the Budapest Convention, the European Union e-Evidence framework,   artificial-intelligence-supported investigation, and increasingly distributed cloud infrastructures.