Dear Reader,
As a representative of the Czech Presidency of the Council of the EU and the EUCPN Chair, I am delighted and honoured to present to you the latest EUCPN Newsletter.
Working with victims of crime is a particularly sensitive issue. Every criminal act and every person affected by it are different and have specific needs. The situation is all the more complicated when the victims are in a particularly disadvantaged position, which makes them vulnerable. In the spring of 2022, the European Commission presented two important proposals addressing the status and protection of particularly vulnerable victims of crime (victims of sexual violence against women and domestic violence, victims of child sexual abuse). Development of assistance to victims is a part of the mandatory Common Horizontal Strategic Goal of EMPACT 2022+. In the Czech Republic, we have extensive legislation for victims of crime with special rights for particularly vulnerable victims. We focus a lot on the treatment of particularly vulnerable victims (especially by the police and other public agencies), for whom we have a unique project of Special Interrogation Rooms and newly created methodologies.
For these reasons, the Czech Presidency of the EUCPN chose to focus on working with particularly vulnerable crime victims in the second half of 2022. We also have the honour of organising this years’ European Crime Prevention Award (ECPA) and Best Practice Conference (BPC), both addressing this topic. The events will be taking place on 8 and 9 December in Prague. As the organiser, we plan to invite not only the representatives of the Member States and the EUCPN secretariat, but also a large number of experts and practitioners.
The aim of the Presidency is to exchange experiences and good practices, most importantly in the areas of early identification of victims of crime (especially those particularly vulnerable), prevention of their secondary victimization and re-victimization and how to increase motivation to report crimes and thus to reduce the latency of crime.
During our Presidency, we will also deal with other topics, such as 1) the benefits of the concepts Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design and Crime Prevention Through Urban Design & Planning and of technical standards of crime prevention for security in cities (the international conference will take place on October 6, 2022 in Prague) or 2) involvement of volunteers in crime prevention.
I hope you enjoy reading this newsletter, and I would like to thank the EUCPN Secretariat for putting it together and the Member States for their contributions.
We look forward to all the knowledge and best practice sharing,
Michal Barbořík
EUCPN Chair
|