The Budapest Convention is an international cybercrime treaty that helps countries cooperate on investigations involving digital evidence. It gives law enforcement a legal framework for requesting data across borders, preserving electronic records, and sharing information about cybercrime cases. This matters because valuable evidence is often held by a provider in another country, not on a suspect’s device.
In practice, the convention is used when investigators need logs, account records, chat history, or metadata from cloud services, including AI platforms. Its value depends on speed and evidence handling: requests should preserve timestamps, access records, and other integrity markers so the material can be trusted in court. Defenders and providers can prepare by keeping tamper-evident logs, retaining data consistently, and maintaining a clear chain of custody for exports. In cyber incidents, the treaty can be the difference between usable evidence and data that disappears before it can be lawfully collected.