United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute

 Logo, Outdoors

Acronym: UNICRI

Established: 1968

Address: Viale Maestri del Lavoro 10, 10127 Turin, Italy

The United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Reseach Institute (UNICRI) is a UN entity that was established with the aim to support intergovernmental, governmental, and non-governmental organisations worldwide in formulating and implementing policies aimed at preventing crime and facilitating criminal justice. 

UNICRI’s work is dedicated to: advance understanding of crime-related problems, foster just and efficient criminal justice systems, support the respect of international instruments and other standards, and facilitate international law enforcement cooperation and judicial assistance. 

The programmes run by UNICRI are dedicated to promoting national self-reliance and the development of institutional capacities in areas such as: counterfeiting, organised crime and corruption, urban security, violence against women, etc.

UNICRI also works to support the fight against online crime and to respond to the misuse of technology. The key aspects tackled by UNICRI include: cybecrime, organised crime involvement in cyberspace, terrorists’ use of the Internet, cybersecurity in robotics and autonomous systems, cybersecurity of national critical infrastructures, training curricula for judges, prosecutors, investigators and practitioners, big data and criminal investigations, information sharing in public private partnerships, digital forensics, child online protection, online profiling, and discrimination and racism in cyberspace. The Institute’s Emerging Crime Unit is involved in a number of joint projects in these areas; one example is the SECURED project, which involves the EU member states, and it is aimed as proposing an innovative architecture to achieve protection from Internet threats. 

UNICRI is also involved in the PROFILING project, which is aimed to identify and tackle the challenged posed by technology to the fundamental right to data protection, especially in the context of profiling. In addition, the Institute is part of the PRISM project (Preventing, Redressing and Inhibiting Hate Speech in New Media), which focuses on: awareness raising and capacity development in the area of fighting online hate speech and hate crimes, and developing effective tools and redress mechanisms for responding to online hate speech.