Paris Project Meeting January 2012

Item – Statistics Objective 5

B. Proia

With financial support from Criminal Justice Programme 2008European Commission – Directorate-General Justice, Freedom and Security

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Contents

• Executive summary• Expectations of the Objective• Methodological approach• Key to success• Progress of the Objective• Findings and comments (1) (2)• Changes in direction• Summaries of discussions• Summaries of comments• Conclusions

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Executive summary

• Original Objective scenarioAnalyse the connection between organised crime and corruption through the exchange of statistics between the Italian Desk at Eurojust and the Italian Anticorruption and Transparency Service

• Topics to be developed- identify statistical analysis of interest regarding the corruption

phenomenon that the Italian Desk at Eurojust and the Italian Anticorruption Authority could generate on a regular basis

- identify and develop software solutions within EPOC on how to exchange statistics of interest

- experiment with software solutions on how to exchange statistics of interest

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Expectations of the Objective

• Value of the report- assess the evolution of the phenomenon- identify areas and sectors most at risk- reveal links between criminal organizations - implement policies for the information and prevention- initiate specific cooperation

• Type of reportquantitative and qualitative reports on corruption cases generated on the basis of a general judicial information with reference to a certain period of timeinformation not requested: sensitive information, individual cases under investigation

• Perspectives- extend the analysis involving other countries as a partner- extend the analysis to other crimes such as the fraud to the allocation of

community funds

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Methodological approach

• Adopt the operational model “Hub & Spoke”a system in which Eurojust is the terminal (HUB) of the flow of data fromPartners (SPOKE). The S.A.eT. and the Italian Desk at Eurojust wouldprocess the data to carry out statistics and to analyze the final data

• Select and analyse appropriate corruption indicators- Crime indicator: specifies the offense against the Public Administration,

which is connected to corruption- Sector indicator: indicates what area of the Public Administration has been

involved - Time indicator: indicates the time interval covered by the data- Territorial indicator: indicates the geographical area of reference

• Carry out an experimental phaseconsisting of the manual exchange of general information with a view to provide sample reports

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Key to success

• Limitations- the lack of homogeneous statistical data

- the different legal and judicial organizations of reference countries

- the different administrative structures at local level

• The key to overcoming these limitations has been identified in:

- finding a language that can make the data homogeneous

- standardizing the data through the adoption of a targeted Data Dictionary in the EPOC environment

- approach the subject in a structured way

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Progress of the Objective

• Two investigations have been carried out1. The Italian National Desk has researched the number of instances

where corruption was part of or defined as the crime that had taken placeThe report was made under the following search criteria:- crimes where the Italian National Desk at Eurojust have been involved- time frame for the last 5 years- types of crime where corruption is indicated as the crime or as being part of crime.

2. Investigation with partners has been done within the EPOC IV Data StandardsIn the Data Standard 8 data types have been identified with the objective. The project partners were asked to assess whether in their systems there was any extra overlap with these 8 data items that had not been mapped yet in the standard

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Findings and comments (1)

• The investigation on cases involving corruption genereted a report of first results containing 13 cases

• The results identified some limitations:

- the number of instances in the last five years is low and not sufficient to warrant significant results

- not all information can be processed by Eurojust and is not available

- the number of instances of corruption internationally may be low because the crime is hidden as part of other crimes, this results in low visibility of corruption

- the indication of corruption is national rather than international

- the crime is committed locally

- the small number of cases is not sufficient to identify trends

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Findings and comments (2)

• The investigation within the EPOC IV Data Standard has showed that 8 data types were identified with the objective

• These data cover 3 categories- Contact details- Type of Crime - Specific S.A.eT. data items • Of the 8 data items identified inside the Data Standard - 3 matched to the CMS and could be identified in a number of

partner systems, this related to part of a country impacted, description of the events and date of occurrence

- one reference only to the legal impact- no matches to specifc S.A.eT. items

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Changes in direction

• The results whilst interesting allowed no interesting conclusions to be reached

• In order to find an alternative that might deliver the spirit of the objective, the S.A.eT. proposed "Mapping and analysis of corruption in Europe" with the purpose to:

- gather information from each project partner- conduct a qualitative and quantitative analysis on the phenomenon

of corruption in the Public Administration- have as a landmark in the area comprising the countries

participating in the project- use general information contained in the EPOC database- provide references for the implementation of prevention and

cooperation within Europe.

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Summaries of discussions

• Could the “Mapping and analysis of the phenomenon of corruption” in general deliver the spirit of the objective?

• Is it possible to gather the necessary information from partners to carry out a different sort of analysis?

• Are there any objections to sharing in principle generic data to gather a wide view of the phenomenon of corruption?

• Is it possible to gather data for this objective outside of the Eurojust legal basis?

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Summaries of comments

• Reporting of interest would focus more specifically on detail rather than generic reporting

• General reporting is trend based and less interesting than specific reporting on a case by case basis

• Interest is on providing deeper analysis on complex operational cases

• An alternative to broaden the scope outside of Eurojust to partners of the project shifts the focus to provide a generic view coming from partners and not Eurojust

• Generic approaches are not the specific focus of juctice organisations that focus on international cooperation at the level of Eurojust

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Conclusions

• More generally there is a further limitation in the lack of a homogeneous definition of the offence of corruption at the level of Member States of the EC

- most do not have legislative definitions of corruption- some have special anti-corruption laws- corruption within the various public institutions (police, customs,

judiciary, and government administrations) can be very different • Although the general conclusion has been that further

effort along the lines of a comparative analysis would not lead to success, must be pointed out a positive aspect, namely the fact that the highlighted limitations may be a constructive starting point for any future development of this project.

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Questions /Discussion

Support from

Partners

End - Paris Project Meeting January 2012

Item – Statistics Objective 5

B Proia –

With financial support from Criminal Justice Programme 2008European Commission – Directorate-General Justice, Freedom and Security