The Third Asia-Pacific Regional Meeting on Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics takes stock from the experience of the Centre of Excellence UNODC-INEGI

The Third Regional Meeting on Crime and Criminal Justice took place from October 29th through 31st in the city of Chengdu in southwest China. The meeting attracted participants from 15 countries as well as Staff from the UNODC Headquarters Office in Vienna and the Centres of Excellence UNODC-INEGI and UNODC-KOSTAT.

With an active role from the UNODC-INEGI Centre of Excellence, the Conference made a summary of the international standards regarding the topic of crime and criminal justice statistics. The event also addressed the most relevant methodological tools to estimate crime and some of its most notorious forms, such as corruption. Following this, participants made a briefing of the methods employed by their organizations at the national level for the collection of crime statistics. The former was useful to diagnose compliance with some of the tools put forward by UNODC, such as the United Nations Crime Trends Survey (UN-CTS), the Sustainable Development Goals indicators, especially Goal 16, and the implementation of the Internacional Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS) in the region. For this purpose, participants made a recap of the strengths and weaknesses of their national statistical systems. Speakers of the Conference also shared successful experiences regarding the promotion and implementation of the tools promoted by the United Nations to measure different forms of delinquency.

As to facilitate the consolidation of the agreed international standards, UNODC addressed several initiatives at the regional level to achieve improvements in this matter. In particular, the network of Centres of Excellence to disseminate experiences and opportunities for methodological development and technical assistance was deemed useful. To this regard, one of the insights of the Conference is that the Centre of Excellence UNODC-INEGI constitutes a model to follow for the Centre of Excellence UNODC-KOSTAT. As to guarantee appropriation, the specificities of the Asia-Pacific region will be born in mind.

The meeting was also an opportunity to showcase the most recent innovations in the field of crime statistics. China, the host country of the event, brought forward a series of initiatives such as a recidivism survey and a Big Data project to provide close to real-time updates to data on the Criminal Justice System. UNODC also took the chance to communicate the latest methodological definitions for the measurement of specific SDG 16 indicators. An offer by UN staff was also made to be part of a series of pilot studies aiming for a better data collection on hard-to-measure criminal behaviors.