Regimes are Weaponising INTERPOL with Fake Red Notices

For weeks I have been representing Mariam Abdelbasette, an Egyptian woman who gave birth in Muscat on 25 May and then faced deportation to the country she had fled. Held in a military hospital after a caesarean, she was told Oman intended to forcibly return her to Egypt — following her husband, who was forcibly deported in April and has since disappeared. There is now some relief. Mariam has been given the green light to leave Oman with her baby, after sustained pressure from multiple embassies. She may go without first collecting a birth certificate from the Egyptians — the step that would have put her within reach of the state she fled. The relief is real. What nearly happened to her is the point.

Her only offence was to criticise the Egyptian government online. For that she faced deportation to Egypt, where more than 60,000 political prisoners are held and dissent is all but criminalised. Oman justified her detention by pointing to an Interpol Red Notice. No such notice exists — no record on Interpol’s database, no document ever produced. Interpol’s rules expressly forbid political red notices, and it would never issue one for a government’s online critic. Oman and Egypt were acting in collusion, dressing up a direct request as compliance with international law and claiming Interpol was the reason.

This is the technique I see again and again: a regime that wants someone returned, knows it has no lawful basis, and reaches for the language of multilateral process to make the unlawful look routine. The false Red Notice need not be real — only asserted quickly, while a frightened person scrambles to prove a negative. And it is not only activists at risk. The same tactic strands business people and executives at borders and freezes their accounts. They need the same protection, applied early: an assessment of the risk before they travel, a challenge to the lawfulness of the notice, and, where one has been wrongly entered, a formal request to Interpol’s Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files to correct or delete the data. Mariam was fortunate, she got access to NGO and my help. In turn the Special Rapporteur on Terrorism and diplomatic pressure from embassies helped. We hope that there will be a final resolution soon. The next person may not be so lucky.