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Russia continues anti-corruption fight after exiting Council of Europe convention

On Monday, the Russian president submitted a bill denouncing the Criminal Law Convention on Corruption to the State Duma

MOSCOW, January 18. /TASS/. Moscow’s withdrawal from the Council of Europe anti-corruption convention does not mean that Russia has stopped its fight against corruption, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a press conference on Russian diplomacy in 2022 on Wednesday.

There are several conventions in the Council of Europe that do not require membership in the Council in order to participate, he noted. "The West has decided to cancel Russia here as well, creating discriminatory obstacles for our representatives, setting unacceptable conditions. We will not put up with this. We recently withdrew from the convention on combating corruption for this reason," Lavrov said. However, this does not mean that Russia "has stopped tackling corruption," he added. "This means that we don’t want to just sit in the back of the relevant body and listen to the West’s lectures," Russia’s top diplomat stressed.

On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin submitted a bill denouncing the Criminal Law Convention on Corruption to the State Duma (the lower house of parliament). The document was signed in Strasbourg on January 27, 1999. According to explanatory notes, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers previously decided to terminate Russia’s full membership in GRECO.

In early January, Russia announced its exit from the Criminal Law Convention on Corruption due to illegitimate actions by the Council of Europe. The team for the Council of Europe’s affairs at the Russian embassy in France noted then that Moscow would terminate its participation in any body of the Council of Europe in the event that the authority of any Russian representative was restricted.

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