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Russia leaves European anti-torture convention, ending prison oversight

The Council of Europe's monitoring committee can no longer enter Russian prisons or detention places. It visited over 450 sites there between 1998 and 2021.

An empty prison inspection room, its door ajar, lit by a single shaft of light, as a guard's silhouette watches from a dark corridor.
Illustration generated with AI.

Independent monitoring of prisons and detention places in Russia has ended. Russia's withdrawal from the European anti-torture convention took effect on 1 November 2026. The Council of Europe's torture prevention committee can no longer visit the country. Its president, Alan Mitchell, said the withdrawal "marks the end of any independent monitoring of places of deprivation of liberty inside the Russian Federation".

The EU said the primary victims of the withdrawal are and will be Russian citizens. The EU said Russia has not allowed any monitoring visits to places of deprivation of liberty. On 18 November 2024, the torture prevention committee issued a public statement on Russia.

On 17 September 2025, the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, passed the denunciation law unanimously, by resolution N 9034-8 ГД. Later that month, Vladimir Putin signed the federal law ending Russia's participation. The law covered the convention itself and its Protocols No. 1 and 2. The Council of Europe says the Russian authorities notified Strasbourg of the decision to denounce the convention on 30 October 2025.

Between 1998 and 2021, the committee made 30 visits and entered more than 450 places of detention, according to the Council of Europe. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the committee has received numerous accounts of alleged torture and ill-treatment by Russian officials in occupied Ukrainian territories and inside Russia. It could not visit Russia because the Russian authorities refused to cooperate.

The committee carries on elsewhere. It will keep its work in the 46 remaining Council of Europe member states. Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said in September 2025 that the Council of Europe itself had blocked Russia's work in the committee. He said it had done so by refusing since December 2023 to allow the election of a new Russian committee member.