EU guidelines for the international classification of crime for statistical purposes : 2017 edition

Eurostat deals with a great variety of legal concepts and criminal justice systems among European countries in its annual data collection on crime and criminal justice. A common classification of offences will strengthen comparability and consistency of crime and criminal justice data and improve analytical capabilities at the national, European, and international levels. A common framework based on internationally agreed concepts, definitions, and principles to group all kinds of criminal offences into useful statistical categories already exists in the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS). This common framework is applicable for all forms of crime data at all stages of the criminal justice process as well as for data collected in crime victimization surveys. The data on criminal offences published by Eurostat are already classified according to the ICCS. However, variations of national criminal law and the lack of common definitions between European countries still limit the comparability of crime data. This booklet presents the structure of the ICCS, its classification principles and its relations to existing classifications, to facilitate the implementation of the ICCS. It provides a brief overview of concrete organizational and technical tasks for a successful implementation of the ICCS at the national level, which should engage all crime data users and data providers. In addition, an implementation strategy through the creation of a correspondence table, a tabulation of all offence categories in the ICCS linked to all offences on the national level, is briefly described.