12th Professor V.S. Mani Memorial International Law Moot Court Competition 2026

International cyber law has evolved from a fragmented set of national approaches into a contested field of public international law over the past two decades. Early efforts, including the Council of Europe's 2001 Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, focused on harmonizing criminal law and mutual legal assistance. From 2004 onward, successive UN Groups of Governmental Experts (GGE) sought to clarify how existing international law — particularly the UN Charter, international humanitarian law, and the law of state responsibility — applies to state conduct in cyberspace. The 2013 and 2015 GGE reports affirmed that international law applies online, but consensus broke down in 2017 over the applicability of self-defence, countermeasures, and IHL, exposing a deep divide between Western states favouring the lex lata approach and Russia, China, and several non-aligned states pushing for a new binding instrument. The current architecture is dual-track. The Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) on ICTs, established in 2018 and renewed through 2025, runs alongside the UN Ad Hoc Committee that finalized a draft UN Convention against Cybercrime in 2024 — a treaty criticized by industry and rights groups for broad surveillance provisions. Parallel non-binding frameworks, notably the Tallinn Manual 2.0 and the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace, attempt to map customary norms on sovereignty, due diligence, attribution, and protection of critical infrastructure. State practice, however, remains opaque: incidents such as NotPetya (2017), SolarWinds (2020), and the Viasat hack at the outset of the Russia-Ukraine war have tested doctrines of attribution and proportionate response without producing clear precedent. Today the core legal disputes concern whether sovereignty is itself a primary rule (the UK rejects this; France and the Netherlands accept it), the threshold at which a cyber operation constitutes a 'use of force' or 'armed attack' under Articles 2(4) and 51 of the Charter, the legality of cross-border countermeasures, and the application of IHL principles of distinction and proportionality to military cyber operations. Data sovereignty, cross-border evidence gathering, and the regulation of offensive cyber capabilities by private actors add further complexity, leaving international cyber law in a state of normative flux.