Ladies and Gentlemen,
the European Sourcebook is a highly valuable tool for all those interested in international comparison of developments in crime becoming known to the law enforcement authorities, in adjudication, in sentencing, in remand detention (prisoners awaiting trial), and in imprisonment.
Now all three editions, the latest from 2006 are available free of charge, as PDF-Files. In addition, the raw data are also available free of charge as Word-Files.
If you are interested, please turn your browser to the following URL: http://www.europeansourcebook.org/

With best regards,
Hans-J. Kerner

P.S.:
Below, after the signature, you will find an excerpt of the original description as given on the starting page of the European Sourcebook.

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Hans-Juergen Kerner
List-Manager, Criminology and Criminal Justice News
c/o Institute of Criminology, University of Tuebingen
Sand 7, D-72076 Tuebingen (Germany)
Phone: +49-7071-297-2931   ---  Fax: +49-7071-295104
Email: [log in to unmask]
URL: http://www.ifk.jura.uni-tuebingen.de
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What is the European Sourcebook?
The first European Sourcebook project started in 1996. In that year the Council of Europe established a committee to prepare a compendium of crime and criminal justice data for its member states. Information was collected from 36 European countries covering the period 1990 to 1996. It included both statistical data and information on the statistical rules and the definitions behind these figures. This resulted in the publication by the Council of Europe of the Sourcebook in 1999, now also available on-line.
Also a 'Key Findings' bulletin was published in 2000 and an issue of the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research was mainly devoted on some results of the Sourcebook data.

The second edition:
A second European Sourcebook project sponsored by the Switzerland, United Kingdom and the Netherlands governments has been completed and the findings have been published in december 2003 by the Dutch WODC in their publications series (nr. 212). The publication reports on criminal justice data for 40 European countries covering the period 1995 - 2000. The publication is available in pdf format. Also, the original data as sent by all countries is available in MSWord.

The third edition:
In June 2006 the third edition was published, again by the WODC (nr. 241). This edition is a limited edition: not all tables were updated. It covers the years 2000 - 2003 for 37 countries. As with the second edition, the publication (in pdf format) and the original data (in MSWord) can be found on this website.