Releases

WADA removes three National Anti-Doping Organizations from compliance ‘watchlist’

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The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) confirms that the following three National Anti-Doping Organizations (NADOs) have successfully addressed their non-conformities with the World Anti-Doping Code (Code) and have therefore been removed from the compliance ‘watchlist’.

  • The German Community of Belgium;
  • Montenegro; and
  • Romania.

On 28 October 2021, as allowed by Article 8.4.5 of the International Standard for Code Compliance by Signatories (ISCCS), WADA’s Executive Committee (ExCo) approved a recommendation by WADA’s independent Compliance Review Committee (CRC) to ‘watchlist’ the NADOs and gave them an additional four months, until 28 February 2022, to correct outstanding non-conformities with the Code. These issues related to a lack of implementation of the 2021 Code within their legal systems.

Since the revised Code was approved by WADA’s Foundation Board in November 2019, WADA has been in regular communication with all Code Signatories to ensure that they had every opportunity to bring their anti-doping rules and programs – in addition to countries’ legislation where needed – satisfactorily into line with the revised Code that entered into effect on 1 January 2021.

NOTE: At present, there are two NADOs that are non-compliant, from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Russia. No Anti-Doping Organization is currently on the compliance ‘watchlist’.