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Back to basics: a Red Notice is a request by one of Interpol’s 196 member countries to locate a wanted person and hold them pending extradition. Getting a Red Notice issued can be, administratively speaking, relatively simple. A National Central Bureau submits the request, the General Secretariat reviews it for compliance, and if the formal criteria appear to be met the notice goes out worldwide. The whole process runs at speed and, in a large share of cases, on information supplied by the requesting state alone.
But removing one is a different exercise. The applicant must apply to the Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files. The CCF is not a court. It holds no hearings, and it starts from a presumption, codified in Article 128(1) of the Rules on the Processing of Data, that what the requesting state submitted is accurate. The burden of displacing that presumption falls on the individual, who will usually never see the underlying file.
INTERPOL Law and Practice, the forthcoming book by this site’s editors, calls this the ‘architecture of imbalance’. The numbers appear to bear this out.
In 2001 Interpol reported roughly 1,500 active Red Notices. By 2024 the figure was around 62,000. Fewer than one notice in ten appears in the public database. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the notices aren’t spread evenly around the world. Freedom House reports that Russia, home to less than 2 per cent of the world’s population, accounts for around 38 per cent of public Red Notices. Like many statistics, this is worth taking with a pinch of salt, as the opaque nature of the system means that we can’t truly know which country issues the most. Public Red Notices are very different from actual total numbers of issued notices, but the point remains that it’s very likely that certain regimes have more of an appetite for using the system than others.
The inbuilt safety valve, meanwhile, is under strain. The CCF’s Chairperson, Teresa McHenry, told Interpol’s General Assembly in Glasgow that the Commission received 2,793 requests in 2023, up 70 per cent on 2021. In 2024 around 70 per cent of data access requests ran past the four-month statutory timescale, and 30 per cent of deletion requests ran past the nine-month one. For the person named in the notice, each of those months means closed borders and frozen accounts.
We wrote about the Commission’s compliance statistics in A Numbers Game last year; the book takes the analysis further.
Why does the imbalance persist? Partly volume: no review body can examine every request forensically at the pace the system demands. Partly design. The CCF applies what the book describes as a rule of non-enquiry. It does not sit in judgment on the requesting state’s courts, does not retry the case and does not decide guilt or innocence. It asks one question only: does the data comply with Interpol’s own rules? That restraint is defensible in principle. Combined with the presumption of accuracy, it means the system’s default answer to a challenge is no.
None of this is an argument for tearing the system down, and the book does not make one. Stopping criminals escaping justice by crossing a border matters more in 2026 than it did in 1923. The question the authors pose is narrower and harder: are the safeguards adequate to the scale of the system? Their answer, on the evidence assembled across twelve chapters, is ‘not yet’.
This article draws on Chapter 2 of INTERPOL Law and Practice by Rhys Davies and Ben Keith, published by Thomson Reuters on 23 September 2026. Pre-order from Sweet & Maxwell.
