The catalog of offenses, also called thesaurus of offenses, is a list of legal qualifications drawn from the codes and from the national legislation in criminal matters. The latter consists of ordinary laws which, by virtue of the legislative function reserved by the Constitution for the Parliament, are the acts approved by the two Houses of Parliament.
The so-called “acts having the force of law” adopted by the Government are placed on the same level as ordinary laws: the law decrees and legislative decrees. To these sources are added the government regulations approved by the Council of Ministers which take on the formal role of decrees of the President of the Republic.
The function of the catalog, which in the computerized version dates back to 1968, is operational since it has to interface with the legal qualifications, constituting crimes, contained in the archives of the prosecutors’ judicial offices. To the crimes, which are the basis of Istat’s synthetic and analytical classifications, the fines that are considered in the international classification of crimes (ICCS) and administrative penalties, both pecuniary and non-pecuniary, have recently been added to the list.
The regulatory reference is included in the list if it indicates a criminal sanction and is represented in its constituent elements at its maximum level of detail. It is considered the norm that punishes illegal conduct and not the one that only describes it.
To represent it, the article of the codes is used or the year, the number and the article of the complementary laws, with its versions, if any (BIS, TER etc.), but also the sub-references of the article: paragraph , letter, number.
A special working group, set up within the Sistan Quality Circle (National Statistical System) on justice and security, is responsible for validating the updating of the catalog of offenses with the new rules of Italian legislation and at the same time implementing the correspondence in the international classification of crimes.
The drafting of a regulatory collection may lead to errors, inaccuracies or omissions. Please indicate any shortcomings found and thank you in advance for any report to the following email address: giupen@istat.it.
The research is available in Italian only.