Page 477 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS355 Jean-Louis B.
statisticians working in industry, etc.) and don’t take into account three
specific characteristics of official statistics:
 Official statisticians do not work for a specific consumer or a small
group of users; they receive public funds to be at the service of the
society at large and to contribute in their domain to the Citizens’
Right to Information.
 The individuals’ Right to Privacy very often conflicts with the society’s
Right to Information (in order to know its collective characteristics).
 The bodies responsible for official statistics have a dual authority, a
scientific authority and an administrative authority.
During the preparation of the declaration, a divergence arose in particular
concerning the mandatory nature of surveys, which is often the case in official
surveys, and on the concept of ‘informed consent’.
The ISI Declaration was adopted during the Centenary ISI Session (45 th
session) held in Amsterdam in 1985. An ISI Committee on Ethics was
established but was not very active until 2000. It was reactivated following the
holding in Buenos Aires in June, 1998, of an international conference intended
to bring the support of the international community to INDEC (Instituto
Nacional de Estadística y Censos) after the strong attacks of the President of
the Argentine Nation on employment surveys. After careful work by this
committee, a revised and modernized version of the ISI Declaration on
Professional Ethics was approved by the ISI Council in July 2010 and formally
presented on World Statistics Day on 20 October 2010. The same year the
committee's activities were terminated and an ISI Advisory Board on Ethics [7]
(ABE) was established to advise the ISI EC and Council on relevant ethical
issues and to recommends or undertake activities for promoting observance
of ethical principles in statistics. Most of the work of the ABE since its creation
concerned official statistics (e.g. manipulation of the CPI in Argentina between
2008 and 2015, or deletion of the long form in the Canadian census in 2010).
In addition, the ABE also intervened to defend statisticians unfairly prosecuted
while they had done their work properly; the iconic cases were those of
Graciela Bevacqua (Argentine) and Andreas Georgiou (Greece).
3.4. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the communist systems in
1989 had huge consequences; the market-oriented system obliged a far
greater number of people with economic and social responsibilities in
society to take decisions. Such decisions implied the use of an adequate
information system and, in particular, sound and relevant statistical
information. Moreover, it was vital for statisticians to gain the confidence
of the public in the information they were to produce. In the early months
of 1990, statisticians from Central and Eastern Europe were fully aware
that it was not so easy to face this new challenge and to gain this
indispensable trust of the public. They were looking for new references,

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