This year’s Interpol General Assembly went surprisingly well for democratic member States. Unexpected defeats for Russia and the United Arab Emirates at the top of the organization showed what the democracies can achieve in this global police-coordination agency. But if law-abiding nations want to continue to build on – or preserve – their fundamentally strong position in Interpol, they need a strategy that extends their leadership positions and that continues the push for reform in advance of next year’s General Assembly.
This year’s meeting Nov. 4-7 in Glasgow, Scotland, marked the end of the second term of the long-serving Interpol Secretary General Jürgen Stock of Germany. His nominated replacement, Valdecy Urquiza of Brazil, had been backed by Interpol’s Executive Committee but required the endorsement of the General Assembly in Glasgow to take up his new position. And going into the meeting, democracies looked to be on their back feet on several fronts.
During his 10 years in office, Stock brought significant organizational and financial changes to Interpol, many of them for the good. But his tenure was also marked by continued lack of transparency, and steadily rising concern about the abuse of Interpol by authoritarian regimes. That abuse was largely facilitated by Interpol’s adoption in the late 2000s of improved communication systems. This had the unintentional effect of making it easier for ill-intentioned States to abuse the Interpol system, while also making that abuse more effective. The long-running saga of Russia’s efforts to harass Anglo-American investor and anti-corruption activist William Browder through Interpol, which Browder retold in his 2015 best-seller Red Notice, amplified this concern. But Browder was only the most prominent of the many targets of the politicization of the Interpol system.
While Stock’s reforms were generally well-conceived, they were insufficient to significantly curb abuse of Interpol: at best, his reforms merely shifted abuse from one part of the Interpol system to another. The next secretary general was always going to have to continue the reform agenda, not least because Interpol’s reputation, its legal immunity, and its funding depend on it upholding, and being seen to uphold, its constitutional ban on allowing its systems to be used for political, racial, religious, or military purposes. (We laid out a reform plan prior to the Glasgow meeting here at Just Security.) The latest General Assembly unsurprisingly confirmed Urquiza as Interpol’s new Secretary General, while also taking a series of steps that give reason for cautious optimism – mixed with concern.
Interpol, though not strictly speaking a law enforcement organization – as it has no power to make arrests – is imbued with the attitude of the police bodies that make up its ranks. In other words, it was for many years an organization that appeared to believe that the less it said about its work, the better it was at doing its job. Wisely, Interpol appears to have recognized the error of that point of view and has adopted a more open attitude.
Interpol still has a long way to go before it can be called transparent, but the general trend is towards more openness and engagement with civil society and the public, and at this General Assembly (which Bromund attended in person), the media had better access and Interpol was a good deal more forthcoming with briefings. As a good many – though by no means all – of the complaints about Interpol stem from its lack of transparency, this is a change for the better.
A Few Good Surprises at the Top
The biggest shock at the General Assembly was something that, in the end, did not happen. The president of Interpol, Major General Ahmed Nasser al-Raisi of the UAE, is a divisive figure who had been under investigation in France for torture and arbitrary detention. As the General Assembly meeting began, word filtered out that Bahrain, acting as a cat’s paw for the UAE, was going to put forward a resolution to allow the president, normally limited to a single term, to stand for a second one. Given the concerns about al-Raisi, which are amplified by fears that the large donations the UAE gave to the Interpol Foundation to distribute to Interpol are somehow linked to al-Raisi’s success in securing the Interpol presidency, this resolution was intensely controversial.
In the end – and much to the surprise of many observers, Bromund included – the resolution was defeated. Interpol did not release the resolution or the vote totals, but Bromund learned that there were 91 votes for the Bahraini amendment and 55 against, with a significant number of States abstaining or not voting. As the resolution needed two-thirds of all 196 member States to vote in favor – or 130 votes – it fell short by about 40 votes.
Of course, there are two ways to see this result. The motion lost, but a near-majority of Interpol member nations voted in favor of it. Whether or not all of them understood precisely what they were voting for is unclear, but it illustrates that there are a significant number of members that will reliably vote for the autocrat. Worse, that number seems to be growing: in 2018, only 61 nations voted for the Russian candidate for the Interpol presidency. Still, the result of the vote illustrates a significant fact: Interpol’s rules, while not perfect, do tilt the field in favor of the status quo and the democracies. That is an advantage to build on.
The other major development – at least as far as votes are concerned – at the General Assembly was the election of nine new members of the thirteen-member Executive Committee, the body charged with overseeing the work of the Secretary General. The balance of the Committee before the Assembly meeting was at best in doubt, with rule-abiding Belgium, Argentina, the U.S., the U.K., Spain, and Namibia being at least matched by the UAE (in the form of President al-Raisi), Nigeria, China, Egypt, Turkey, and India, all known Interpol abusers.
The new Committee is slightly better balanced, with Belgium, Argentina, the U.S., Germany, France, Namibia, and Canada matched against abusing UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Turkey, and China, with the final nation, Morocco, the host of the next Assembly, not having a particularly good or bad reputation. Just as significant was the defeat of the Russian candidate for the Committee, coupled with the fact that the well-regarded U.S. candidate, Mary Rodriguez, was elected a vice president of the Committee, receiving more votes (125) than any other candidate. This puts her in a good position to seek the presidency of Interpol in a year’s time when al-Raisi departs, should she wish to put herself forward for the job.
Finally, the Assembly took a number of steps that we called for in our previous Just Security article. It approved the publication of the 2023 Annual Report of the Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files (CCF), Interpol’s appellate body. In an apparent effort to improve the CCF’s processing times, one of the major sources of complaints about it, the Assembly substantially increased the CCF’s budget and authorized its Commissioners to work more days per year in exchange for better compensation. Lastly, Interpol released a long-overdue update to its guide to the organization’s understanding and application of its Article 3 (which bans political abuse) so that it now at last also includes a guide to Article 2 (which mandates that Interpol respect the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
The Downsides
Behind the scenes in Glasgow, there was a good deal of muttering about Vitalie Pirlog, the Moldovan former head of the CCF, whose residence was raided in June, according to the New York Times. Pirlog is apparently now in Dubai, and his lawyer declined comment to the Times. But the circumstances of a newly-exposed scheme, in which at least 20 wanted individuals allegedly bribed corrupt Moldovan officials to obtain cancellations of Red Notices, naturally raise concerns that Pirlog himself was involved. Moldovan police investigating the case with the help of the FBI and other jurisdictions believe that, in return for payment, the Moldovans falsely informed Interpol that the fugitives had been granted refugee status. While there is no suggestion as of yet that Pirlog took bribes while serving in the CCF, a position he left in 2022, the full scandal has yet to be exposed.
But even in public, the news was not all good. The next three meetings of the Assembly will take place in Morocco, Hong Kong, and Qatar. Admittedly, one of Interpol’s more difficult problems is finding nations who are willing to pay the costs of hosting an Assembly, but meeting in Hong Kong after the deliberate Chinese destruction of Hong Kong’s independent legal existence is a poor response to this challenge. The number of votes the amendment on Al-Raisi’s tenure received is worrying. The fact that there are currently no U.S. officials seconded to screen Red Notices before publication is a regrettable step backwards from normal practice. And both that screening task force and the CCF are still under-staffed.
More broadly, Interpol shows no desire to slow down its adoption of new initiatives, to increase national dues to improve both its screening systems and its ability to plan strategically, or to suspend its most abusive members. And there were many developments that will take time to assess, from changes approved to Interpol’s various rules to the quality of the guide to Articles 2 and 3.
But the broader point about Interpol that the latest General Assembly drives home is that the organization can only work – and will only be kept on the rails – to the extent that the leading democracies that provide a disproportionate amount of its funding, behind-the-scenes leadership, and technical expertise cooperate with each other. Interpol’s rules are far from perfect, but they do exist, and they are broadly satisfactory. The essential need is not to remake Interpol, but to keep it from being remade.
What the democracies badly need, in other words, is a strategy for Interpol, one that addresses the strains on funding that keeps Interpol chasing projects that can be monetized instead of working to tightly define priorities, and one that sets up a conveyor belt of qualified candidates for upcoming vacancies instead of relying on nick-of-time lobbying.
This year’s Interpol General Assembly went surprisingly well. But next year, Interpol will need a new president. In 2027, the terms of the current CCF commissioners will expire. As Russia’s Executive Committee candidacy, al-Raisi’s bid to change Interpol’s rules, and the Moldovan investigation into Red Notice corruption show, the risk of autocratic manipulation of or corruption in Interpol has not gone away. The improved transparency of Interpol is welcome, and the democracies rightly stand as the defenders of Interpol’s rules, but in Interpol as in all organizations, people are policy.