Defining and Registering Criminal Offences and Measures - Oapen

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Aims and Methodology of the Study
the questionnaire. Also, the trial questionnaire featured questions on whether the
concepts presented on the include/exclude lists of the different definitions were
separately identifiable in criminal law. It was decided that answers to these questions
are not necessarily needed from all national correspondents and might be a
burden too heavy to answer for those correspondents without a legal background.
Therefore, the respective questions were dropped, too.
Once again, different members of the group acted as regional coordinators for
groups of national correspondents (see above). National correspondents were
encouraged to contact their respective coordinator in the case of questions or
problems, while the coordinators themselves contacted their correspondents in
case they found problems or errors in the filled questionnaire and to clear open
questions. This system once again turned out to work efficiently.
3.2.4 The Bonn conference
The Bonn conference took place from June 13 th to 16 th, 2008. It comprised internal
ESB group sessions and “public” sessions together with all attending national
correspondents. The internal sessions were mainly devoted to data evaluation and
production of the AGIS report and the 4 th edition of the ESB. A stronger cooperation
with UNODC 23 regarding their CTS 24 was agreed upon during the meetings,
too. It was decided that the group members should also fill in the parts of the
initial trial questionnaire that were dropped while producing the final version. This
had already been done during the trial phase for almost all countries represented
within the group. However, definitions were partially changed due to the results of
the trial phase. 25 Therefore, the dropped parts had to be updated, too. These updated
parts of the former trial questionnaire should be compiled into an additional
questionnaire after the Bonn conference and circulated among group members.
The conference sessions were used for discussions with the national correspondents
on the new questionnaire. The project, the changes for the 4 th edition
and the motivations for these changes were explained to the correspondents. All
parts of the questionnaire were addressed and problematic issues were discussed
at the round table. There was also a session devoted to correspondents meeting
their respective regional coordinator. There, the filled questionnaires and problems
and questions related to it were discussed in detail.
23 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Vienna.
24 United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems; see
www.unodc.org.
25 For details, see below.