Regular meeting of the Plenipotentiary Council in Minsk

On 29 March, the CIS Execom welcomed the regular meeting of the CIS Council of Plenipotentiary Representatives at Statutory and other Bodies of the Commonwealth

Yury Andreyev, representative of the IPA CIS Secretariat, attended the meeting.

The plenipotentiaries drafted the agenda of the Council of Heads of State meeting to be held on 7 June. It included the items on the CIS-wide cooperation in the fields of trade, innovations, electric power generation, chemical industry, exchange of geospatial data, healthcare, and culture.

Members of the Council took note of the information of the CIS Execom on the progress in the implementation of security cooperation policies of the CIS countries. According to Director of Department for Cooperation in the Field of Security and Countering New Threats of the CIS Execom Albert Druzhinin, the relevant cooperation of the CIS countries and bodies in 2015 focused on the implementation of policies in combating crime, drug and illicit substances trafficking, combating drug addiction, terrorism and other violent forms of extremism, trafficking in human beings and illegal migration. The policies have been fully implemented consolidating the progress of the CIS countries in ensuring internal security.

The reports emphasized the IPA CIS activities implementing the Long-Term Plan of Model Law-Making in the CIS in 2011-2015. The period saw the adoption of model laws, amendments to model codes, commentaries to model laws adopted earlier and other instruments. Inter alia, the following documents were adopted/drafted:

Amendments:
• Model CIS Penal Code on Combating Cyber Crimes
• Model CIS Anti-Corruption Penal Code;

Commentaries on model laws:
• Countering Laundering of Criminal Assets, Financing Terrorism and Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction
• Protecting Sovereignty
• State Secret
• Streamlined Recruitment of Workers for Temporary Employment in the CIS
• Information Exchange in the Field of Migration;
Advisory Glossary of Terms and Concepts for the Prevention of Terror against Critical Facilities in the CIS;

Draft Commentaries on the model laws – Border Control Agencies (Forces), Sovereignty.

The plenipotentiaries also discussed CIS budget issues and inputs to the Guidelines on the Adaptation of the CIS Activities to Modern Realities to be presented to the CIS foreign ministers on 8 April in Moscow.

Having considered the mainstreaming of the role of the CIS sectoral cooperation agencies in developing international legal instruments, the Council recommended them to submit draft documents to the CIS Execom and support them by detailed annotations for adoption.