Manual for the Development of a System of Criminal Justice Statistics

The present Manual has been prepared in response to the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) resolution 1997/27 of 21 July 1997, entitled “Strengthening the United Nations Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Programme with regard to the development of crime statistics and the operations of criminal justice system”. In that resolution, the ECOSOC welcomed the offer of the Government of Canada “to assist the Secretariat, which will work in cooperation with the members of the Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Programme Network and other interested experts, in the preparation of the Guide onthe Development and Analysis of Criminal Justice Statistics”. The Council also requested the Secretary-General “to develop, in cooperation with members of the Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Programme Network and other interested experts, an annex to the above-mentioned Guide that would include specific examples of basic statistical instruments used for data collection, such as questionnaires, information output, reports, classifications, definitions and victimological issues, with a view to making national approaches to data collecting more compatible, thus making data comparable”.