As expected, after the utterly idiotic statement by Ivanov, head of the Presidential Administration, that "Russia has already fully ratified Article 20 of the UN Convention against Corruption," this is now becoming the official position.
And now the Justice Ministry has told Interfax that everything is fine—there is nothing that needs to be ratified.
This looks absolutely ridiculous, because the Justice Ministry itself recently prepared proposals for ratification. The headlines were quite unambiguous:
Even on the Justice Ministry's own website:
Pretty strange, isn't it?
That is why, in a speech that mattered a great deal to me, I spoke first and foremost about lies, not even about corruption. Just take another look at the scale of the state's lying.
These guys found themselves in a situation where a large group of people is demanding ratification of Article 20, and 87% of the population supports those people. For that reason, they do not want to speak out against ratification. But they want even less to introduce criminal penalties for illicit enrichment—because they themselves would end up in prison for it.
What do you do in that situation? Exactly: lie again on a cosmic scale. For example, just say: WE HAVE ALREADY RATIFIED IT, EVERYTHING IS ALREADY FINE HERE.
And never mind that all of this was разобрали давно. Never mind that the chairman of the Constitutional Court is calling for ratification. Never mind that United Russia itself campaigned on this in the elections.
Lies as the foundation of state policy have proven themselves wonderfully, so let us keep lying. You cannot spoil porridge with butter.
In this connection, all of us, supporters of criminalizing illicit enrichment, need to understand two things very clearly:
Article 20 of the UN Convention against Corruption does require ratification—a special vote in the State Duma (the lower house of Russia's parliament).
In fact, our law is not so much about ratification itself as about its practical implementation in Russia—introducing the concept of "illicit enrichment" into the Criminal Code and establishing criminal liability for the illicit enrichment of officials and employees of state corporations.
Given the second point, statements that "it has already been ratified" are of course infuriating because of their dishonesty, but they do not hinder the #Twenty campaign.
Now we are waiting for officials to declare that everything has already been added to the Criminal Code too—we just failed to notice it. It was written in very small print.