Interpol’s supreme governing body, the General Assembly, will formally elect the organization’s new secretary general at its next meeting Nov. 4-7 in Glasgow, Scotland. The incoming secretary general, who is responsible for Interpol’s day-to-day operations, should be prepared to advance a reform agenda, because while the improvements Interpol has made to its institutions and procedures over the past eight years are significant, they are insufficient. If the new secretary general does not support further reforms, Interpol will continue to face significant and growing political and legal challenges.
Interpol is the foremost mechanism for cooperation among police organizations around the world, and the secretary general is Interpol’s most important operational figure. While its president is the organization’s leader (that position currently is held by Major General Ahmed Nasser al-Raisi of the United Arab Emirates, who has been under investigation in France for torture and arbitrary detention), the secretary general is responsible for how Interpol is staffed and how it works. That position is currently held by Jürgen Stock of Germany, who has served the two consecutive five-year terms he is allowed by Interpol’s rules.
Stock was elected in 2014 to bring greater stability to Interpol after the tenure of Ronald Noble of the United States, who brought Interpol’s technology into the modern era but showed little interest in ensuring the organization upheld its rules against political abuse. Furthermore, that very technology made abuses even easier and more effective. Stock’s mandate, therefore, was to advance organizational reforms that would keep Noble’s improvements while remedying Interpol’s defects.
The past 10 years have indeed brought significant reforms. The most important change was to the Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files (CCF), Interpol’s appellate and advisory body, which was comprehensively revamped in 2017. Stock also drove the creation of the Notices and Diffusions Task Force (NDTF), which screens Red Notices prior to publication, ended Interpol’s problematic reliance on private-sector donations, and (belatedly) pushed through a desperately needed increase in national dues and ended Interpol’s relationship with the controversial and largely unsuccessful Interpol Foundation. Finally, Interpol has become more transparent and now publishes a comprehensive budget, select CCF decision excerpts (though they are heavily redacted – and more on that later), and some statistics on the work of the NDTF.
Interpol did not take these steps out of the goodness of its heart. It took them because the political and legal risks of Interpol abuse had become so severe that they threatened the future of the organization. The risks Interpol was facing were illustrated by the little-known but significant financial compensation Interpol paid in the “Red Notice” case in 2015, which concerned Indonesian nationals who were subject to an abusive Indonesian Red Notice and filed a case at the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague that Interpol ultimately settled.
But abuse in the Interpol system never stops evolving: the reforms of yesterday will always be subject to evasion by clever and abusive regimes. Moreover, since the mid-2010s, abuse of the Interpol system has increasingly become part of the broader problem of transnational repression, shining a brighter spotlight on these abuses. The pressure, therefore, is on the new secretary general to continue to advance a reform agenda, both to close the holes that Stock did not address and to meet the new challenges that are fundamentally caused by the ongoing desire of Interpol’s more autocratic member States to find new ways to abuse and manipulate it.
When the Interpol General Assembly meets, it will have before it a recommendation from Interpol’s 13-member Executive Committee to name Valdecy Urquiza of Brazil as the new secretary general. The General Assembly is free to reject this recommendation, but there is no likelihood it will do so. Urquiza won the committee’s recommendation by 8-2 over Stephen Kavanagh of the United Kingdom (both Brazil and the U.K., which held seats on the committee, abstained from its vote), with Mubita Nawa from Zambia receiving one vote.
Kavanagh’s defeat was not a shock – the democracies have been in a minority on the committee since 2021 – but the margin of his loss was a surprise. As executive director for police services at Interpol – its second-highest-ranking position – and with a long background in U.K. policing, Kavanagh ran what appeared to be an effective campaign with strong support from the U.K. government that focused on the challenges that international organized crime poses for Interpol.
Judging from who had votes on Interpol’s Executive Committee, Urquiza, by contrast, likely received support from Turkey, the People’s Republic of China, Egypt, India, Nigeria, and the UAE, all known Interpol abusers. He ran on two themes: the purported need to diversify its leadership by electing a representative from the Global South, which he asserted would improve global cooperation with the organization, and the need for Interpol to serve all its members and avoid politics.
The latter appeal sounds like Urquiza wants to make a stand against the political abuse of Interpol, but it actually means nothing of the sort. In Interpol’s language, serving all member countries and avoiding politics means that efforts like the Anglo-American campaign to suspend Russia after its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine are divisive, political, and bad, whereas keeping Russia, China, and other notorious abusers inside the Interpol system is inclusive, apolitical, and good. The fact that Urquiza made a visit to Beijing and then apparently secured the PRC’s vote on the Executive Committee is telling and ominous.
So the fate of Interpol’s reform agenda is very much in doubt. If Urquiza wishes to stymie reform – and his plans, of course, have yet to be revealed, though it is disappointing that his active, public campaign revealed almost nothing about his agenda – he will not be able to do so immediately or without constraint. He will work under the direction of the Executive Committee and within the existing budget, and will be bound by Interpol’s existing staff contracts. It will take time to steer Interpol, for good or for ill, in any direction, and the results of any changes Urquiza makes will take years to manifest in cases of abuse or legal challenges.
But for precisely the same reasons that drove the election of the departing Jürgen Stock, Interpol cannot afford to give up on reform. It cannot risk, politically, legally, and ultimately financially, suffering a sustained run of bad headlines or legal defeats. While Interpol’s legal position in the United States rests on the seemingly strong foundation of the International Organizations Immunities Act, which makes it difficult to sue Interpol successfully in the United States, in Europe it is vulnerable to challenges based on what the European Court of Human Rights or the European Court of Justice might decide are inadequate Interpol remedies for its faulty decisions or abusive acts.
An effective Interpol reform agenda would include:
- Expanding the work, improving the transparency, and increasing the powers of the CCF
The Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files is a far more effective and serious body than it was a decade ago. The decisions it produces are now often models of careful legal analysis and argumentation, a fact that brings great credit to its commissioners, and in particular, to Teresa McHenry of the United States who chairs the CCF. But the fact remains that the CCF is drowning in work. It meets only four times a year for sessions of five days, yet in 2021 – the last year for which information is publicly available – it received 1,417 new requests from individuals seeking its assistance and finalized 1,597 cases. In 2023, the CCF received 2,790 new requests. This is a crushing workload for both the commissioners making the decisions and the approximately 12 staff members who have to prepare submissions for the commissioners to consider.
The CCF should become a full-time body, meeting continuously throughout the year, with a substantially expanded staff to support it. This will require a significant increase in the CCF’s budget. Unfortunately, spending money on the CCF is simply not a priority for Interpol: a 2022 budget obtained by one of us (Bromund) showed that Interpol planned to spend only an additional 1.647 million Euros annually of a requested increase in statutory contributions (i.e. national dues) of 22 million Euros annually on enhancing the screening of its notices, and a paltry additional 150,000 Euros on improving CCF governance.
The CCF does not just need more money, more staff, and more time to work. It also needs to be more transparent. The CCF Annual Report for 2022 has yet to be published. The CCF’s decision in 2017 to start publishing decision excerpts was commendable, but these excerpts are few in number and so heavily redacted as to be of limited use. The CCF has abandoned its former practice of identifying the countries that were the source of the greatest number of requests received: that practice should be resumed. The CCF and Interpol’s General Secretariat should together publish an undated guide to their understanding and application of Interpol’s Article 3 (which bans political abuse); the last such guide, published in 2013, is completely out of date. They should also publish a guide to Article 2 (which mandates that Interpol respect the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or UDHR); this guide has been promised for a decade without result.
Finally, the CCF should be mandated by the General Assembly to be stricter about deadlines. In theory, applicants are owed a CCF response within nine months after the CCF accepts a case, but in practice, and in the experience of one of us (Grossman), this deadline too often drifts by without a decision or a formal notification of delay. The abusive States have also caught on to the fact that by responding minimally to CCF requests for information, it is possible to string out CCF proceedings almost indefinitely. The CCF should set and enforce tighter deadlines for national responses and decide automatically against deliberate time-wasters.
- Expanding and improving the operations and transparency of the NDTF
Since its creation, the Notices and Diffusions Task Force has screened all Red Notices prior to publication and all Wanted Person Diffusions (WPD) immediately after transmission (a “diffusion” is a message sent directly from one Interpol member State to one or more other member). In 2023, Interpol published 23,969 Red Notices and WPDs, while the NDTF refused or cancelled 1,603 requests or previously-published Red Notices and WPDs.
These figures seem useful. But for purposes of analysis, they are close to useless. The 1,603 rejections or cancellations do not all pertain to requests made in 2023, so it is impossible to use this figure to derive a percentage of abusive requests made annually. Adding Red Notices and WPDs together means that any trends in these very different categories are also impossible to discern. Running refusals and cancellations together makes it impossible to figure out how much abuse the NDTF is catching before it occurs, and how much it is only catching after the fact. Since these numbers are not broken down by requesting nation (as the CCF used to break down its cases), it is again impossible to figure out which countries are responsible for creating the most work. Interpol should prioritize publishing higher quality and more transparent information, which also provides the public with the ability to allow for proper analysis.
Within the last month, the NDTF has (according to information received by Bromund) started to review Blue Notice requests prior to publication. Such notices are used to locate an individual of interest to an ongoing investigation and are easily used to evade the scrutiny given to Red Notices while achieving very similar ends. The extra scrutiny is a welcome change. But if and when Interpol creates new kinds of colored notices, these should also be routinely scrutinized by the NDTF. This will require an expansion of the NDTF in terms of personnel (and thus in funding), an increase that is already sorely needed. As the NDTF contains no more than 45 individuals, each of them has to review more than one Red Notice or WPD every single day of the year, with (while working in France, where the organization is headquartered in Lyon) no weekends or vacations and no time for training or any other responsibilities. This is an implausibly burdensome workload.
Finally, and most crucially, the NDTF should take the experience and precedents of the CCF more fully on board. It is disturbing that in 2020 (the last year for which data is publicly available), the NDTF rejected or cancelled 531 Red Notices or WPDs for failure to comply with Article 2 (political abuse) or Article 3 (on the UDHR), while in the same year the CCF made 296 deletions for similar reasons. Because of Interpol’s habit of running years together, this does not mean that the NDTF missed 296 abusive Red Notices in 2021. But it does imply that a good bit of abuse gets by the NDTF. One likely reason for this is that the CCF is willing, in certain contexts, to consider the overall human rights record of a requesting country, while the NDTF on occasion appears to struggle even to apply its own rules – much less to apply any broader analysis.
- Going Slowly on New Initiatives
Interpol was founded to promote communication between law enforcement bodies in different countries. But it has recently begun to branch out into not just passing information around, but analyzing it and delivering the results to its members. The 2022 draft budget makes much of Interpol’s desire to develop analytical capacities, both through hiring additional experts and developing AI systems, to support national-level law enforcement. And the most recent update of Interpol’s Rules on the Processing of Data gives Interpol the ability to accept large volumes of data that cannot be reviewed for compliance with its rules, to process it, and then to return compliant results to the member country that provided the data (see a forthcoming analysis in the International Enforcement Law Reporter by Bromund and Grossman for details.)
This drive to provide analytical capacity has two flaws: it moves Interpol closer to becoming an operational body, and it allows abusive countries to dump huge volumes of data into Interpol without improving Interpol’s ability to screen the results of its analysis for compliance with its rules. Interpol is already hard-pressed to uphold its rules today, and while becoming an international analytical center is appealing for an organization with a persistent tendency towards empire-building, it is a risky road to follow.
Another major Interpol priority is financial crime. Indeed, Interpol is on the verge of introducing a new “Silver Notice” that will focus on such crimes. This is an extremely risky idea. Abusive regimes commonly rely on accusations of financial crime (including fraud and tax evasion), for the simple reason that accusing someone of murder requires a body, whereas accusing them of fraud requires no physical evidence at all. If Interpol does introduce a Silver Notice, it is a near-certainly that much of the abuse that now tends to be focused in the Red Notice and WPD systems will flow into the Silver Notices. As Charlie Magri, a former CCF staff attorney now in private practice puts it, “The very nature of the Silver Notice, designed to trace and recover funds, makes it a powerful tool that could be turned against political enemies.” It would be best to shelve the concept of a Silver Notice until Interpol proves it can reliably screen the notices it is already publishing.
- Further Regularizing Interpol’s Finances
To his credit, Stock did a great deal to improve both the presentation and the reality of Interpol’s finances. But under his leadership, Interpol has also embarked on large and expensive new projects while its core operations remain under-funded. To close the gap, Interpol relies heavily on project contracts with national governments, as well as a limited amount of funding from ethically-challenged donors such as the International Olympic Committee. Interpol now has a screening mechanism for private donations, but it assumes that donations from governments do not need to be screened.
This is not a safe assumption. Nor is it right for Interpol to undertake projects with very limited transparency simply because governments want to pay for them. Interpol should seek another substantial increase in national dues and use the additional funds to end its reliance on one-off national contracts and all donations. The rule should be simple: all Interpol expenses should be borne by all Interpol members, in proportion to their overall contributions, and no one country should have the ability to buy a project on its own. Interpol should then reduce its activities that do not relate to the Notices and Diffusions system until it can pay for that system to be screened properly.
- Applying Interpol’s Rules to Persistent Abusers
One of Stock’s less glorious moments was his response to the Anglo-American efforts in 2022 to suspend Russia from Interpol. Stock oversaw the release of an Interpol statement asserting that Interpol’s Constitution contains no provisions for suspending a country’s membership. That is technically correct but misleading: the provisions on suspension are in Interpol’s Rules on the Processing of Data. Unless and until Interpol creates deterrent power against abuse by demonstrating that it will sanction an abuser, that abuse will continue, for the simple reason that abuse is easy, cost-free, and effective.
Valdecy Urquiza’s campaign made it clear that, like Stock, he wants Interpol to keep serving all its member nations, and that he would therefore far rather have Russia (or China, or Iran, or Venezuela, to name several notorious abusers) in Interpol than out of it. The approach of keeping the abusers in the system has been tried repeatedly for the past decade and it has failed. Urquiza will accordingly have to be very lucky to avoid a repeat of the 2022 saga, and if it does recur, he will be in the hot seat. It would be wiser, and preferable, to apply the rules as they exist, without favor or bias.
Conclusion
Even with the best will in the world, Urquiza will not be able to do any of these things on his own. There are many member countries in Interpol that have no interest in better screening of Red Notices, many that will welcome the concept of a Silver Notice, and many that support giving Interpol more analytic capacity, and very few that will want another dues increase. The CCF is part of Interpol, but the secretary general does not run it. Getting more staff for the NDTF will be a budgetary challenge. Worse, the campaign that Urquiza ran to become the presumptive next secretary general of Interpol does not suggest he has any interest in any of these measures.
But ultimately, while the first victims of Interpol abuse are the dissidents, refugees, and rich but purportedly unloyal business figures who are targeted by the abusive regimes, the final victim of Interpol abuse will be Interpol’s own reputation, budget, and legal immunity. Interpol has a tendency to assume that running Interpol is mostly about satisfying the law enforcement organizations that are its core constituency. But as Noble’s replacement by Stock demonstrates, even dynamic secretaries general can fall foul of wider pressures generated by their failure to control the consequences of political abuse in the Interpol system. That has happened before – and it could very well happen again. In the interim, the victims of Interpol abuse will pay the price.