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The first of the seven 2026 decision excerpts published by the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files (CCF) went against the applicant. On the purpose point he had better facts than most people who run it, and the Commission still refused to delete.
He had been on the board of a company whose property was said to have been sold to related companies below market value, leaving it insolvent. His home state circulated a Diffusion for ‘abuse of authority with grave consequences’. He challenged it on four grounds. The data did not describe his role; the case was really a commercial dispute; the domestic proceedings were unfair; and the Diffusion served no purpose, because the state knew where he lived and had never asked for him back.
The Commission found ‘a clear description of the Applicant’s role’ and read the facts as showing ‘criminal conduct rather than a mere contractual dispute’. What the contracts really meant was a question for the domestic courts, since the Commission ‘is not empowered to conduct investigations, assess the credibility or weight of evidence’. The due process complaint came with no documents. He had not yet been tried and had not appeared when summoned, and the Commission repeated its familiar line that it ‘does not function as an appellate body for national court decisions’.
Article 81(3)(d) of INTERPOL’s Rules on the Processing of Data (RPD) allows a notice to be cancelled where the requesting NCB ‘obtains data allowing it to carry out the required action’ and takes no steps, with no reasonable explanation. The Commission applied it to this Diffusion by analogy.
His evidence went further than usual. The Ministry of Justice in the country where he lived had written to the requesting state’s prosecutors asking if they meant to seek his extradition, and said it would treat extradition as waived if no request arrived by a set date. None did. Police there had also questioned him at the requesting state’s request.
The Commission found against him anyway. The host country’s NCB said it had never passed his whereabouts to the requesting state, and he had not shown that the state knew his precise location. On that record the Commission was ‘not in a position to conclude’ that the state had been able to seek extradition and had chosen not to.
The point is evidential. A requesting state that ignores a letter has not admitted it knows an address. The CCF wants a document that puts the address in the state’s hands, such as court papers served there or a mutual legal assistance request that names it.
Most applicants in the 2026 set did better. Five of the remaining six excerpts ended in deletion, largely because the requesting state could not say what the applicant himself had done. Our review of the 2024 excerpts covers the earlier decisions, and our guide to removing a Red Notice sets out the process.
Article 81(3)(d) exists to clear notices that have stopped doing any work. Decision No 1 shows how much proof the Commission wants before it accepts that one has.
