The 16th session of the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice is underway in Vienna, Austria. Today, the Executive Director of the **United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)** addressed participants, and called on Member States to develop a coherent blueprint for crime control, *” to save the world from the threat of organized crime.”*
Mr. Antonio Maria Costa claims that countries lack sufficient information on organized crime activities such as money-laundering, corruption, identity-theft, counterfeiting, cyber-crime and environmental destruction. *”Despite the fact that trans-national organised crime is one of the greatest threats to security, we operate in an information fog. We do not know the scope of the threats we face and we cannot gauge global crime trends.”*
He urged countries to track organized crime more effectively and provide information of the type already collated by UNODC on illicit drugs so that policy-makers have the data they need to generate an effective global response. *”These are threats that no state can fight alone,” Mr Costa added. “The building blocks of a global crime control regime are taking shape, but the overall architecture needs to be made coherent.”*
The General Assembly has placed drug control, crime prevention and combating terrorism among the UN’s priorities for 2008-09, and the UNODC is gearing up its capacity to deliver technical assistance to Member States. *”In crime control, we are aiming to position the Office at the intersection of security and development, with criminal justice as the lynchpin,”* the UNODC Executive Director said. *”After all, there cannot be security without development and vice versa. For both to be sustainable, there must be justice and the rule of law.”*