The Judiciary of Guatemala seeks harmonization of its crime statistics with the ICCS

On July 13, the UNODC-INEGI Center of Excellence for Statistical Information on Government, Crime, Victimization and Justice (CoE), organized an awareness-raising workshop on the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS) for the Judiciary of Guatemala.
The purpose of it was to raise awareness among the staff of the Statistical and Informatics Units of the Judiciary of Guatemala about the importance of adopting the ICCS as a basis for the classification and organization of statistical information generated in the field of crime and criminal justice at the institutional level.
During the workshop, the UNODC-INEGI Center of Excellence explained that the adoption of ICCS would allow the establishment of a common and unified framework for the classification of crimes in Guatemala, and provided background information on the Classification, its structure, associated benefits, examples of its application and a roadmap for its implementation. Staff emphasized that the ICCS will provide a solid and reliable basis for analysis and evidence-based decision making in the criminal justice field.

In addition, Dorian Gomez, from the Informatics Unit of the Judicial Organism of Guatemala presented and explained in detail their system for recording information related to crime and criminal justice. During this presentation, he provided explanations on the operation, characteristics and scope of the system.

The Judicial Branch expressed its interest in the potential benefits that the adoption of ICCS at the institutional level could generate, in terms of improving the standardization, comparability and use of data. Consequently, the CoE will provide assistance to the Judiciary over the next few weeks to familiarize them with the technicalities of the classification and how to develop a correspondence table between ICCS and their specific catalogs.