In 2015, the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC) and the United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (UN-CCPCJ) endorsed the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS) in line with plans approved by UNSC in its decision 44/110 and by the Economic and Social Council in its resolution 2013/37. ICCS is the international standard for defining and classifying criminal offences when producing and disseminating statistical data on crime and criminal justice. Since its adoption in 2015, the interest in aligning national crime statistics with ICCS has grown worldwide, assisted by awareness raising and technical assistance activities carried out by UNODC as well as other national and international stakeholders. Alignment with ICCS is vital for improving the availability of high-quality, comparable statistics on crime and criminal justice at the global level. The present implementation manual is aimed at providing guidance to countries on their ICCS implementation journey. It draws from a decade of experience implementing ICCS around the world. The manual offers concrete steps to promote the uptake of ICCS, determine the scope of implementation, build a correspondence table and produce data in line with ICCS.

The present manual is intended for all relevant producers and users of data in the area of crime and criminal justice statistics interested in implementing ICCS, including the police, the prosecution service, the courts, the prison system, the national statistical office, other relevant government institutions, civil society organizations and other non-governmental actors. The ICCS implementation process will inevitably differ depending on a country’s existing capacities, available resources, national priorities, and technological and institutional environment. Nonetheless, the manual is designed to assist all countries, regardless of existing criminal justice data production capabilities, from those at the very earliest stage of development to those with more advanced crime and criminal justice statistical systems.

Part I of the manual presents a general overview of ICCS, including why it is important and how it can be implemented. The reader is presented with information on the development process of the classification, its intended benefits and the structure of ICCS. Additionally, part I presents a phased implementation process that can serve as a road map for countries. Part II offers concrete guidelines on technical issues faced by countries when implementing ICCS, including determining the boundaries of ICCS implementation, developing a correspondence table, reviewing and standardizing disaggregating variables and producing statistical outputs in line with ICCS. Annex 3 of the present manual contains a series of case studies from 7 countries around the world showcasing different elements of the ICCS implementation process.

Code Level 1 category description
01 Acts leading to death or intending to cause death
02 Acts leading to harm or intending to cause harm to the person
03 Injurious acts of a sexual nature
04 Acts against property involving violence or threat against a person
05 Acts against property only
06 Acts involving controlled drugs or other psychoactive substances
07 Acts involving fraud, deception or corruption
08 Acts against public order, authority and provisions of the State
09 Acts against public safety and state security
10 Acts against the natural environment
11 Other criminal acts not elsewhere classified

P.47 3.3 National ICCS applicability
What constitutes a crime in one country may be considered a minor infraction in another, or not a crime at all. Therefore, behaviours included in ICCS may not be criminalized in some countries. This means that data on criminal offences have to be interpreted in light of the national legislative context. While some behaviours are universally considered as criminal offences, such as the intentional killing of a person by another person (intentional homicide) or the unlawful taking of property from another person (theft), other behaviours can be treated differently by national criminal legislation. For example, national data on ICCS section 06 Acts involving controlled drugs or other psychoactive substances have to be analyzed with consideration of the varying  approaches countries take towards behaviours within this broad category. Depending on the country, certain acts – such as the personal use of controlled drugs or alcohol products – may be classified as a criminal offence, an administrative infraction or permitted by law. These differences need to be considered carefully when interpreting data at the national, regional or global levels by ICCS category...