Monaco opens the cybercrime table
The Octopus Conference opens in Strasbourg today under Monaco's Council of Europe presidency: some 500 experts, 25 years of the Budapest Convention, and a Monegasque justice secretary sharing the opening with the Secretary General.
Strasbourg, not Monaco, is the stage, but the presidency is Monegasque. The 2026 Octopus Conference, the Council of Europe's flagship gathering on cybercrime, opens today, Wednesday, October 14, at the Palais de l'Europe and runs to Friday, October 16. It is organised in cooperation with Monaco's Presidency of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, the six-month role, running from May to November 2026, that has given the principality an outsized seat in the organisation's year.
Riviera Radio put the expected attendance at around 500 cybercrime experts from more than 100 countries, drawn from governments, international organisations, the private sector, academia, and civil society. Monaco's Secretary of State for Justice, Samuel Vuelta Simon, opens the conference alongside Council of Europe Secretary General Alain Berset, a billing that places the principality's justice chief at the front of one of the largest rooms in European criminal justice cooperation.
The edition carries an anniversary. The conference marks 25 years since the adoption of the Convention on Cybercrime, the Budapest Convention, the treaty that has shaped cybercrime legislation and cross-border cooperation for a quarter of a century. The Council of Europe frames this year's meeting as a strategic forum on what comes next, with some sessions livestreamed from Strasbourg.
The agenda reads as a map of where online crime has moved. The Council of Europe lists the impact of artificial intelligence on cybercrime, disinformation, and the prosecution of cyber-enabled international crimes among the central themes. Riviera Radio's account of the programme adds online scams and trafficking, cooperation with online service providers, foreign manipulation, and the illegal use of virtual assets. The Council of Europe adds the condition that runs through its work in this field: safeguards for human rights and the rule of law.
For Monaco, the week is the presidency in action rather than in ceremony. The principality's earlier turns in this calendar were about visibility: taking the chair, hosting, being seen. Opening the Octopus Conference is a working brief, on a subject, digital crime, where a financial centre has interests as well as opinions. What the presidency leaves behind will be judged less on its receptions than on rooms like this one.
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