Ben Keith and Rhys Davies write for The Africa Report | Are Senegal and Madagascar following Rwanda’s lead in use of Interpol Red Notices?

The article was first published by The Africa Report on 7 November 2025 and can be read here.

Interpol needs to reform or faces a proliferation of transnational repression in Africa.

What links Senegal’s Madiambal Diagne and Madagascar’s Mamy Ravatomanga? They are, of course, both wealthy men. They also enjoy prominent profiles in their respective homelands. But, as of October, they also share a rather less happy commonality: their home countries have issued Interpol Red Notices against them for allegations of corruption.

Interpol’s Red Notice system is intended to locate and apprehend serious criminals abroad. It should serve an important purpose in international police cooperation. Used correctly, the corrupt are exactly who it should help to apprehend and bring to justice.

Unfortunately Red Notices are not always used as they are meant to be. They remain open to abuse and manipulation by unscrupulous governments and prosecutors. In such cases, charges can be fabricated and the Interpol Red Notice system abused by repressive states engaged in transnational repression of their political opponents.

The issue is structural. Interpol requires only minimal evidence to approve a request to issue a Red Notice. There is little scrutiny of the applications and, once issued, these notices are notoriously difficult to challenge. The opportunities for manipulating the system are therefore plentiful.

Targets of Red Notices cannot travel, access banking services, or secure visas. They live in constant fear of possible extradition on dubious charges to countries where they will not face a fair trial and could be detained indefinitely, and even tortured. In short, it is an effective intimidation tactic.

When we gave evidence to the UK’s Joint Committee on Human Rights earlier this year, we cited Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates as the prime abusers of the system.

Africa’s turn to the authoritarian playbook

In Africa, Rwanda was outed as the continent’s worst offender last year. Kigali has played the system to great effect for years. It has a long track record of issuing dubious Red Notices against critics and dissidents living abroad on fabricated charges to silence them. Rwanda’s motivations are typical of offending states as the majority of Red Notices are politically motivated.

This brings us to the Red Notices issued against Diagne and Ravatomanga. In both cases, there may be legitimate grounds for investigation. What concerns us, however, is that the pattern of activity around the Red Notices is straight out of the authoritarian playbook for silencing perceived threats.

Firstly, there is an obvious political rationale for intimidating these men. In Senegal, Diagne is an outspoken critic of Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko’s government elected in March 2024. He is also the owner of the Avenir Communication media group, which publishes the popular Le Quotidien newspaper.

In a worrying sign of a slide towards authoritarianism in Senegal, the broadcast of an interview with Diagne was interrupted on 28 October by police arresting the journalist conducting the interview. In Ravatomanga’s case, his proximity to the previous regime, ousted after student protests in a military coup a few weeks ago, has come back to bite him.

…more states are seeing red notices as a weapon in their repressive arsenal rather than for their intended purpose…

Secondly, both are accused of financial crimes. Fraud and corruption are already a favourite ploy of authoritarian regimes to extort or pressure businessmen. The military leadership in Antananarivo has only been in place for a few weeks, but similar allegations have been made against a range of individuals in recent months in Senegal.

In an indication of Sonko’s growing authoritarian tendencies, the National Financial Intelligence Processing Unit (CENTIF) has launched investigations into the sons of former President Macky Sall and Prime Minister Amadou Ba, as well as several businessmen. If the authorities wished to escalate their cases against these men as they have done with Diagne, minimal evidence of financial wrongdoing is needed to prompt Interpol into issuing a Red Notice.

A global problem, an urgent reform

Neither Senegal or Madagascar, or indeed Rwanda, would be the most egregious abusers of Interpol for political gain. That dubious honour sits with Russia. The examples of Diagne and Ravatomanga, however, indicate that more states are seeing Red Notices as a weapon in their repressive arsenal rather than for their intended purpose: to detain serious criminals.

Interpol has allowed this situation to manifest through inaction against abusers like Russia. Syria remains the only state to be suspended from Interpol, and only after nine years of bloody civil war and countless abuses of the system. Following in the footsteps of Kigali, this negligence appears to have registered in Dakar and Antananarivo.

We have long called for reform of Interpol to address the exploitation of Red Notices by bad actors. An increase in the burden of proof needed to trigger a Red Notice and increased scrutiny of requests are well overdue. Interpol already presides over a fallible system that facilitates transnational repression. It should not sit back and allow abuse of its system to proliferate across Africa and beyond.

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