The Federal Council has adopted the message on the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime and has applied to Parliament for ratification. Like most other Council of Europe countries as well as the USA, Canada, Japan and South Africa, Switzerland signed the Convention in November 2001.

The Convention contains uniform standards for the Member States on the regulation of computer crimes (computer fraud, data theft, data corruption, falsification of data, hacking into external data processing systems), child pornography and copyright infringements on the internet. Moreover, it establishes rules for the collection and preservation of evidence in electronic data, in order to safeguard it for the continuation of proceedings and to protect it against falsification and destruction. Finally, the Convention relates to cross-border cooperation between authorities of the contracting states.

In the opinion of the Federal Council, most of the requirements of the Convention are already fulfilled in Swiss law, and also – in particular – in the new Swiss Code of Criminal Procedure, which will enter into force at the beginning of 2011. Adaptations are required in just two areas. Thus the provisions of the Swiss Penal Code relating to hacking (unauthorized infiltration of an external data processing system) are being redrafted so that it will be a punishable offence to put into circulation or make available passwords, programmes or other data, which the perpetrator knows or must assume are to be used for the purpose of hacking. Furthermore, the law on international mutual legal assistance is to be amended so that the authorities are able to forward traffic data from the monitoring of telecommunications traffic to the requesting foreign authorities even before the conclusion of the mutual legal assistance proceedings.

The Additional Protocol to the Convention on Cybercrime, concerning the criminalisation of acts of a racist and xenophobic nature, is excluded from the current ratification application. A separate decision will be taken later regarding the ratification of this protocol.