The EHM began as a three-year pilot project financed by the European Union which offers a standardized framework for countries and regions to compare homicide characteristics, patterns, and trends.

It sought to provide a four-year epidemiology (2003-2006) of homicides in Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden. The study was conducted by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå), the National Research Institute of Legal Policy (now the Institute of Criminology and Legal Policy at the University of Helsinki) and Leiden University. These parties now constitute the EHM steering committee (represented by Janne Kivivuori, Martti Lehti, Sven Granath, Nora Markwalder and Marieke Liem).

The EHM generally relies on information from the police, official criminal justice records, autopsy reports, newspaper articles, and auxiliary public domain sources, although there are slight variations between participating countries in terms of data sources used. It has been left to each participating country to decide on a hierarchy which best fits the goal of having the highest quality data possible, based on which types of documents are considered the most reliable.