Can the Macolin Convention Save the World of Sports?

A European initiative to bring together prosecutors, police, sports clubs, and the gambling industry to fight corruption in sport is slowly picking up speed. World of Crime investigates.

Some Names to Remember:
- The Council of Europe Convention on the Manipulation of Sports Competitions, better known as the Macolin Convention, a multilateral treaty that entered into force in 2019.
- The MARS Network, a network of magistrates and prosecutors working on sports corruption which collaborates and shares information on relevant cases.

A word to the wise, this story gets technical but is very much worth your time, if you are interested in how sports corruption gets prosecuted. 

Some good yet obscure news came out of Belgium and Lithuania in July. The two countries had ratified the Council of Europe Convention on the Manipulation of Sports Competitions, also known as the Macolin Convention for the town in Switzerland where it was signed in 2014.

The news was not exactly met with widespread coverage. It hardly met with any attention in the Belgian and Lithuanian press, despite both countries having been exposed to severe match-fixing scandals in the past.

However, among the right c…