Amb. Cortese has been elected today Chair of the 30th session of the United Nations Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Commission (CCPCJ), which formally opened in Vienna on 4 December 2020 and will last until December 2021.
The CCPCJ – a functional commission of ECOSOC – is the principal policy-making body of the United Nations in the field of crime prevention and criminal justice.
Italy is currently serving as one of the forty Member States of the CCPCJ and has recently been re-elected by ECOSOC for a further three-year term (2021-2023).
In assuming the Chairmanship, Ambassador Cortese recalled the importance of the mandate that the Commission will carry out in 2021, being the CCPCJ the preparatory body of the United Nations Crime Congress, whose fourteenth edition will take place in Kyoto from 7 to 12 March 2021. The current pandemic and its socio-economic implications – he continued – have a considerable impact on criminal trends, exacerbating some forms of crime and testing the resilience of criminal justice systems. Against this background, the CCPCJ constitutes a useful platform for dialogue among States, International Organizations and Non-Governmental Organizations, as well as a tool for strengthening international cooperation in the fight against crime.
The Commission will meet in Vienna, in its annual regular session, from 17 to 21 May 2021. The thematic discussion, which traditionally occupies the second day of the regular session, will focus on sountering the smuggling of migrants, and in particular on: ‘Effective measures to prevent and counter the smuggling of migrants, while protecting the rights of smuggled migrants, particularly women and children, and those of unaccompanied migrant children’.
