Britain is now more dangerous than the Balkans, it was revealed yesterday.

You are more likely to be assaulted, robbed and burgled in Britain than in the region of southeast Europe once synonymous with war and gangsters, according to a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Your car is at  least ten times more likely to be stolen in Britain than in Albania, Croatia or the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Motorists in London are ten times more likely to have their car stolen than in Eastern Europe

Albania has nearly double the number of judges per 100,000 population than England and Wales

Western Europe suffers from double the amount of burglary, over four times as much  assault, and 15 times as much robbery as the Balkans, the report revealed.

Bringing criminals to justice is also more likely over there.

There are more police and more public prosecutors in Albania than there are in England and Wales, per head of population.

Even impoverished Moldova has more judges than we do.

The wide-ranging report, entitled 'Crime and its Impact on the Balkans', showed that while Britain and other western European countries continue to suffer from a crime wave, Balkan countries have shed their badlands image and have many types of crime under control.

'It seems that an era of lawlessness is passing,'  the report's authors said.

'South East Europe does not, in fact, suffer from high rates of crime, at least in terms of the range of offences commonly referred to as conventional crime: murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary,  theft and the like.

'In fact, most of the region is safer than Western Europe in this respect.'

The region, shattered little more than a decade ago by bitter ethnic warfare, is now 'one of the safer areas of the world.'

Figures on vehicle theft were particularly telling. In Britain, 1,330 vehicles in every 100,000 are reported stolen annually, compared to 166 in Croatia, 113 in Macedonia and just 90 in Albania.

The figures are considered reliable, the report pointed out, because victims almost always report the crime in the hope that their car, bike or van is recovered.

The report suggested crime might be low in the Balkans because there is not so  much of a gap between the rich and the poor.

It said: 'Income inequality is regarded as the most robust quantitative correlate of crime rates.

'Social inequities give  rise to a sense of relative deprivation, which can be used to justify both  property and violent crime.

'But the long history of socialist regimes in the region flattened income differentials.

'While this is changing in a free market environment, the standard indicators of inequality are not pronounced in this region.'

It also might have something to do with the justice system. In England and Wales there are just five judges per 100,000 citizens, the lowest proportion among the countries examined, the report pointed out.

In Croatia there are 42, while even Albania, one of the most backward countries in the region, has 11.  Moldova just beats England and Wales with seven.

England and Wales also have fewer policemen and women. There are just 261 per  100,000 citizens compared to 353 in Albania and 427 in Croatia.

There are also fewer prosecutors (5.2 per 100,000 citizens) than in Croatia (12.3) , Albania  (12.7), Macedonia (8.6) and Moldova (16.6).

The study looked at nine Balkan countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina,  Bulgaria, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia and compared the statistics it found with samples from Western Europe and around the world.