Reconstructing Mutual Legal Assistance for Digital Financial Crime:

Addressing the Sovereignty Paradox and Web3 Disruption

Abstract

The expansion of cross-border digital finance within the ASEAN Economic Community has increased both legitimate financial integration and exposure to digitally enabled financial crime involving blockchain, virtual assets, decentralized finance (DeFi), and Web3 infrastructures. These developments create a legal tension between borderless, rapidly moving digital activity and mutual legal assistance (MLA) mechanisms that remain primarily state-centred and territorially organized. This study assesses the normative adequacy of the 2004 ASEAN Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters for Web3-related digital financial crime and develops a model for legal reconstruction. Using normative and prescriptive legal research, the study combines statutory, conceptual, comparative, and law-reform approaches with Critical Legal Studies, regulatory-lag analysis, and policy-oriented legal research. The analysis identifies three principal constraints: formalistic application of dual criminality, time-sensitive reliance on Central Authority procedures, and a territorial sovereignty paradigm that may be poorly aligned with distributed digital evidence and rapidly transferable virtual assets. The study proposes a framework of regional juridical reciprocity comprising secure electronic mutual legal assistance (e-MLA), a substantive approach to dual criminality, greater convergence on core digital-financial offences and investigative standards, and stronger inter-agency coordination with proportionate emergency asset-preservation mechanisms. The proposed model does not displace state sovereignty; rather, it seeks to make sovereignty operationally compatible with timely, rights-respecting, and interoperable cross-border enforcement in the Web3 era.