Twelfth United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice

The theme for the Twelfth Congress will be "Comprehensive strategies for global challenges: crime prevention and criminal justice systems and their development in a changing world".

Crime congresses have been held every five years since 1955 in different parts of the world and have contributed to shaping international and domestic policies and promoting novel thinking and approaches to complex issues at the heart of one of the key institutions of the modern state: the criminal justice system.

The Twelfth Crime Congress will bring together the largest and most diverse gathering of policymakers and practitioners in the area of crime prevention and criminal justice, as well as parliamentarians, individual experts from academia and representatives of civil society and the media.

The Twelfth Crime Congress, which marks the fifty-fifth anniversary of United Nations congresses on crime prevention and criminal justice, offers a unique opportunity to stimulate in-depth discussion and proposals for action along three principal avenues by:

• Establishing firmly the criminal justice system as a central pillar in the rule-of-law architecture;

• Highlighting the pivotal role of the criminal justice system in development;

• Emphasizing the need for a holistic approach to criminal justice system reform to strengthen the capacity of criminal justice systems in dealing with crime

The provisional agenda for the Twelfth Congress shows that special attention will be paid to: children, youth and crime; smuggling of migrants; trafficking in persons; money-laundering; and cybercrime.

As is the practice, participants in the Twelfth Congress will adopt a declaration containing recommendations based on deliberations held during the high-level segment, the round tables and the workshops, to be submitted to the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice at its nineteenth session, in 2010.