Abstract
The proliferation of cybercrime and cloud-hosted digital evidence has severely strained traditional mutual legal assistance treaties (MLATs), giving rise to persistent jurisdictional conflicts and extradition dilemmas in international criminal procedure. This article provides a comparative jurisprudential analysis of two dominant legal frameworks governing cross-border access to electronic evidence: the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime (Budapest Convention) and the United States Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act. While the Budapest Convention relies on multilateral consensus, state sovereignty, and standardized MLAT channels—supplemented by its Second Additional Protocol—the US CLOUD Act introduces a statutory regime authorizing direct extraterritorial warrants served on US-based service providers regardless of where the data is physically stored. Through a doctrinal and comparative qualitative assessment, this study evaluates the tensions between state sovereignty, extraterritoriality, fundamental privacy rights, and law enforcement efficiency. Our analysis demonstrates that while the CLOUD Act significantly reduces administrative latency in transnational investigations, it creates severe conflicts of law with foreign data protection standards, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and bypasses foreign judicial review. Conversely, the Budapest Convention preserves sovereign equality and procedural safeguards but struggles with operational delays. The paper concludes by proposing a harmonized multilateral model that integrates executive agreement efficiency with independent judicial oversight to resolve extraterritorial data access dilemmas.
