According to news agency BelTA, Ambassador to France Pavel Latushko signed the agreement at a ceremony in Strasbourg.

They join the likes of Australia, Canada and the United States as non-Council members to have become part of the anti-doping partnership.

It has also been signed by countries such as Russia, though this came before the release of the second McLaren report yesterday, which detailed evidence of a state-sponsored doping scheme in the country, described as an “institutional conspiracy”.

The findings, which provided proof of a system in place from 2011 to 2015, are likely to provoke calls for a blanket ban on the nation’s athletes at the Pyeongchang 2018 Olympic Games.

The reaction in Russia has largely been dismissive, with Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) President Alexander Zhukov claiming he is not fearful of an entire ban from the Winter Olympics in the South Korean resort.

Belarus have also had their doping problems, particularly in weightlifting and canoeing.

International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) President Tamas Ajan gave a “guarantee” that Belarusian athletes would be banned from the sport for a year after the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

This came after the IWF vowed to hand a one year suspension to all countries who produced three or more anti-doping rule violations in the combined re-analysis of samples from the Beijing 2008 and London 2012 Olympics.

A total of 13 Belarusians across all sports have tested positive for banned substances at the two editions of the Games as part of retesting being carried out by the International Olympic Committee.

Denis Muzhzhukhin, director of the Belarusian National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA), claimed last month that they would significantly increase the amount of testing done in weightlifting.

He described weightlifting as a “risk zone”, while admitting the spate of recent disqualifications involving athletes from the country was the reason behind the increase.

“The doping problem in the sport is evident,” he told BelTA.

“We need to encourage coaches in weightlifting and also other sports to pay more attention to the fight against the use of banned drugs.”

Belarus were also handed a one-year ban by the International Canoe Federation in July for systemic doping, meaning they missed the Rio 2016 Olympics.

French newspaper Le Monde reported that five members of the Belarus canoe sprint team had failed for meldonium, including brothers Andrei and Aliaksandr Bahdanovich, the C2 1,000m Olympic champions at Beijing who won silver four years later in London.

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has since claimed more transparency is needed to combat doping in sport.

“A general agreement on the mutual recognition of the anti-doping controls referred to in Articles 4.3.d and 7.3.b of the Convention, would increase the effectiveness of these controls by contributing to the harmonisation, the transparency and the efficiency of existing and future bilateral or multilateral doping agreements reached in this area and by providing the necessary authority for such controls in the absence of any agreement on the matter,” the Additional Protocol to the Anti-Doping Convention reads.