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The Council of Europe's anti-torture committee has lost its mandate to inspect detention facilities in Russia, after Moscow's denunciation of the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment took effect on November 1, 2026.
The Council of Europe said Russia formally notified it on October 30, 2025, that it was denouncing the convention. Under Article 22, paragraph 2, Russia remained bound for a further year, so the withdrawal took effect on November 1, 2026. The committee, known as the CPT, said the withdrawal marks the end of its monitoring mandate in the country, and that Russia no longer accepts any independent external oversight of places where people are deprived of their liberty.
Russia joined the convention in 1998, after signing it in February 1996 and ratifying it in March 1998. Between 1998 and 2021, the CPT carried out 30 visits to Russia and visited more than 450 places of deprivation of liberty. The Council said Russia agreed to the publication of only four of those visit reports, and that the committee issued five public statements about Russia because of a lack of cooperation in improving conditions in light of its findings.
Moscow's stated reason for denouncing the treaty was that Russia has had no representative on the committee since December 2023, after the previous member's mandate expired, and that its requests to restore representation were ignored. The State Duma voted unanimously in September 2025 to adopt the denunciation law, and President Vladimir Putin signed it on September 29, 2025. The Kremlin's explanatory note described the lack of representation as discriminatory and said it undermined the convention's mutual monitoring mechanism.
The withdrawal follows Russia's wider break with the Council of Europe. Russia was expelled from the Council in March 2022 after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and it later withdrew from the European Convention on Human Rights. In practice, the CPT had not carried out a visit to Russia since 2021, and access for outside monitors had already stalled after the invasion — so the November 1 date formally closes a monitoring channel that had already stopped operating.
Human-rights advocates and the Council warn the formal end of inspections weakens oversight of how prisoners are treated and of allegations of abuse. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Russia, Mariana Katzarova, told the UN General Assembly in October 2026 that torture in Russia remains widespread and systematic, and noted that the withdrawal was taking effect on November 1. She also reported that at least 55 political prisoners have died in detention since 2022, and that Ukrainian authorities report 438 Ukrainian detainees have died in Russian captivity. Those figures are attributed to her report and to Ukrainian authorities respectively, not stated as independently confirmed totals.
Forty participating states in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said in a joint statement in June 2026 that they regretted Russia's decision and urged Moscow to reconsider before the withdrawal became effective. The Council of Europe said the CPT will continue its work across its 46 remaining member states. Russia remains a party to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which it ratified in 1985, so its obligations under that separate global treaty are unchanged by this withdrawal.