The HEUNI Advisory Board convened in Helsinki to discuss wicked problems and SDGs

The international Advisory Board of HEUNI serves as an important link with the United Nations and the various regions of Europe.

In the 2018 Advisory Board meeting HEUNI’s coming strategy work was discussed in detail. There was a discussion for example on, whether there are some crime prevention and control issues which should be seen as wicked problems, or whether there are some wicked problems that also have criminological aspects, which HEUNI could research.

HEUNI Advisory board member Marcelo Aebi presented the progress on working on 6th edition of the European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics

For this sixth edition, the EU/CoE is co-funding the LINCS project (Linking International Criminal Statistics). It is an 18 months project that aims at linking SPACE statistics with the criminal justice statistics collected by the European Sourcebook members. The expected outcomes of the exercise are as follow: examine (a) what influence the crime trends observed in the countries have on the prison population rates, and (b) what influence the legal system of each country has on prison statistics, in particular, the legal definitions of offences.

HEUNI acts as the Nordic and Baltic Regional Correspondent in the current round of the Sourcebook, in addition to collecting the data in Finland. HEUNI will publish the Sourcebook vol. 6 in HEUNI’s publication series. It was agreed that once the Sourcebook vol. 6 is released HEUNI will put some effort in communicating the release via press release and info graphs or similar.

In addition, there was an in-debt discussion on the role of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in HEUNI’s work.

HEUNI has an input in developing methodology for collection globally comparable data for the indicators measuring the progress of achieving the SDGs. HEUNI’s qualitative research brings out criminological phenomena’s and best practices related to eg. trafficking, gender-based violence and corruption, and this information can be used to advance the SDGs. HEUNI’s current work on corporate social responsibility, labour exploitation, and labour trafficking can be used by states for training and awareness-raising, as well as reporting purposes, in relation to goal 8, “Promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all". Over the years, HEUNI has worked in particular with governmental policy-makers and research institutes in promoting fair, rational and humane criminal justice. HEUNI has been increasingly seeking to promote wider partnerships, and in this way is contributing to the implementation of goal 17, “Revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development".