With the adoption of the European Statistics Code of Practice, Eurostat and the statistical institutes of the EU Member States, including NSO, have committed themselves to an encompassing approach towards high quality statistics. It builds upon a common European Statistical System definition of quality in statistics and targets all relevant areas from the institutional environment, the statistical production processes to our output: official statistics.

The European Statistics Code of Practice sets out 15 key principles for the production and dissemination of European official statistics and the institutional environment under which national and Community statistical authorities operate. A set of indicators of good practice for each of the 15 principles provides a reference for reviewing the implementation of the Code.

The European Statistics Code of Practice has been adopted by the Statistical Programme Committee on 24 February 2005 and has been promulgated in the Commission Recommendation of 25 May 2005 on the independence, integrity and accountabilty of the national and Community statistical authorities.