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On 9 November 2026, UN Human Rights and the Permanent Representation of Germany to the EU held an expert seminar at UN House in Brussels on transnational repression and the misuse of INTERPOL. I opened the discussion, and my co-founder and co-editor of ‘Interpol Law and Practice’ Rhys Davies spoke on the panel.
A Red Notice is a request from one member state, circulated through INTERPOL, asking police worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition. A Diffusion does similar work, but one state sends it directly to the recipients it chooses, and INTERPOL checks it after circulation rather than before. How the system works matters here. INTERPOL carries the message. The arrest, the detention and any extradition belong to the states involved.
Both instruments are fast. A single police force can put an alert out within hours, and an arrest can follow the same day. That speed is what makes the system valuable against genuine fugitives. It also attracts states pursuing critics abroad, because transnational repression works best when it looks lawful.
The Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files (CCF) will delete a notice on three broad grounds:
INTERPOL is now reasonably good at spotting charges that are obviously political, such as treason or criminal defamation. So the states most practised at abuse avoid them. Russia has for years presented cases against critics and businesses as fraud or tax offences that read like ordinary crime. Rhys described the same pattern in Chinese and some Middle Eastern cases, where commercial rivals are accused of fraud or corruption. Garbage in, garbage out.
Sometimes the threat is enough. Journalists we represented had crossed into Russia’s Kursk region with Ukrainian forces, and Russia said it would prosecute them and seek Red Notices. We do not know whether a request was ever made. It did not need to be.
Italy acts on notices with real efficiency, helped by its hotel registration rules. A Ukrainian client of ours, wanted on a Russian Red Notice, was arrested in Moldova and released. He was later arrested again in Italy. Italy eventually dropped the extradition, and the CCF deleted the notice as political and contrary to human rights. That took more than a year. He could afford representation, and the Italian court gave him bail. Many people in his position would have spent that year in custody.
Outside extradition, Chinese requests have affected citizenship and residence decisions in Cyprus and Malta. Those decisions were made with little analysis of the risk to the dissidents concerned.
The CCF’s own targets are one month to decide whether an application is admissible and nine months to decide a deletion request. Rhys could not think of one of our cases that had met that timetable. That matters, because an abusive notice rarely aims at extradition alone. It closes bank accounts, blocks residence and keeps families apart. One of our pro bono clients was targeted over a feud between two families. He has been stuck in Lebanon for eighteen months and has never met his daughter.
Practitioners also work partly blind. The CCF publishes decisions, but they are so heavily redacted that they do not form a usable body of precedent. That makes the Commission’s reasoning hard to predict and hard to argue against.
Rhys proposed more resources for the CCF and closer scrutiny before notices are published. He also called on the democratic states that provide much of INTERPOL’s funding to press for a more transparent system. My own closing point was narrower. Asylum can protect a person in the country that granted it. Until the notice is deleted, it cannot protect them anywhere else.
If you think you may be the subject of a Red Notice or Diffusion, read our guide on how to remove a Red Notice or contact us in confidence.
Red Notice Monitor launches Back to Basics series to ensure our readers understand the essential elements of Interpol and Red Notices before dealing with the complexities.
