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 White paper on crime 2003 Part 2/Chap.6/Sec.1/3 

3 Other international conferences

  International efforts on criminal justice have also been made in other international conferences. For example, the Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions was adopted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1997. In order to domestically implement the Convention, the Unfair Competition Prevention Law (Law No. 47 of 1993) was amended to additionally criminalize the act of providing unlawful profit to a foreign public officer etc. The Convention came into force in 1999 in Japan.
  Furthermore, due to the growing awareness of the necessity to develop international instruments with legally binding force in order to take effective action against cybercrimes committed across national borders, the Council of Europe established an expert group on crimes committed in cyberspace and started preparing a draft of convention in 1997. In 2001, the Convention on Cybercrime (tentative name) was adopted by the Council, and Japan signed this convention in 2001 ( See Part 1, Chapter 1, Section 7 ). The Convention is the world's first comprehensive convention on measures against hi-tech crimes, and provides as follows: (1) the Member States shall be required to criminalize certain acts including illegal access to computer systems, illegal interception and production of computer viruses for the purpose of committing offenses; (2) the Convention shall broadly apply to any offenses committed by means of a computer system in addition to the specific acts mentioned above, and the Member States shall be required to develop procedures for search and seizure of computer data as evidence in electronic form and enable investigative measures such as orders for preservation of data; (3) international cooperation shall be developed in relation to international assistance in investigation and extradition.
  With respect to the " Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons " that was adopted by the Council of Europe in 1983 with the aim of establishing a system for transferring sentenced foreign nationals to their home countries to serve their sentences there, the Law on International Transfer of Sentenced Persons (Law No. 66 of 2002) was enacted in 2002 in Japan. Furthermore, having obtained the approval of the Diet, Japan deposited an instrument of accession to conclude the Convention in February 2003. The Convention, along with the said law, came into force in Japan in June 2003.