Ecuador seeks to improve its judicial statistics by implementing the ICCS

From January 17 to 21, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the Center of Excellence in Statistical Information on Government, Crime, Victimization and Justice (CoE) held an awareness-raising workshop on the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS) in Ecuador.

The workshop was held virtually and was supported by officials from the Judiciary Council and the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC) of Ecuador, as well as representatives from Decentralized Autonomous Governments and Rights Protection Boards from several cities in Ecuador. In total, the workshop reached 150 Ecuadorian officials over 4 days.

The ICCS, developed by UNODC, consists of a methodological tool based on internationally agreed descriptions and principles to improve the consistency and international comparability of crime statistics and improve the capacity for analysis at national and international level.

The workshop sought to make public officers in Ecuador -mainly those in charge of the production of crime statistics- aware of, understand and appropriate the ICCS as a standard for the generation of information.

The presentations and exercises drew from the previous work developed by INEC, with the aim of joining institutional efforts and envisioning possibilities for collaboration between the different institutions to harmonize the process of adopting ICCS at a national scale.

The opening ceremony of the workshop was attended by: María del Carmen Maldonado, President of the Judiciary Council; Antonino De Leo, UNODC Representative for Peru, Ecuador and the Southern Cone; Salomé Flores Sierra, Coordinator of the Center of Excellence and Diego Andrade Ortiz, Executive Director of the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses.

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