Defining and Registering Criminal Offences and Measures - Oapen

I. Corruption
1. First steps and development of draft definitions and
questions
At the beginning the TRANSCRIME report on corruption, fraud, illicit trafficking,
counterfeiting and child sexual exploitation and pornography based on 22 EU countries
was presented. 45 TRANSCRIME created categories based on the data they received.
The group decided it would be easier to start with data and not with definitions,
and try to produce crosstabs for countries, starting with available data and
looking at how relevant they could be for each column. Review of the current
situation was based on the TRANSCRIME report.
It was realized that the main difficulty was to find a definition offering a
maximum of consistency across countries, especially because for most countries –
if not all – corruption is not named this way (but instead e.g. bribery). Afterwards,
45 Study to assess the scope of and collect available statistics and meta-data on five crime types and
propose harmonized definitions and collection procedures for the types of crime for the EU
member states and the acceding countries, final report, 8 August 2006, financed by the European
Commission – DG JLS (Contract No. DG.JLS/D2/2005/04).