The Secretaries General of the 47-nation Council of Europe and the 37-member Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have signed an updated cooperation agreement on the OECD’s 60th anniversary. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) aims to give new impetus to the long-standing cooperation between the two organisations, updating an existing agreement from 1962. The close working relationship between the Council of Europe and the OECD has notably resulted in the joint Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters, a legally-binding international treaty which now covers 111 countries around the world.
For the past 30 years, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly has also provided a platform for parliamentarians from the OECD member states to come together every year to discuss the organisation’s activities. Based on their shared values and objectives, the MoU specifies a number of areas in which the Council of Europe and the OECD aim to intensify their cooperation, using their comparative strengths to add value to each other’s work.
As well as promoting good governance and tackling corruption and money laundering, these include promoting gender equality and sustainability whilst also working together on developing challenges such as cybercrime, artificial intelligence and biotechnology. The MoU was signed by Council of Europe Secretary General Marija Pejčinović Burić and the Secretary-General of the OECD, Angel Gurria, during a video meeting alongside the official commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the OECD’s founding convention.
Council of Europe
