Con motivo del centenario de Interpol, Ben Keith aparece en The Independent

Ben Keith en The Independent, publicado el 6 de septiembre de 2023

En el centenario del Editor de difusiones rojas de Interpol, Ben Keith, gave expert insights into the mechanisms for removing Red Notices when Interpol’s screening mechanisms fail to pick up politically motivated requests.

Haga clic en aquí to view the article on The Independent’s Website.

Interpol is turning 100 with a mixed legacy — as a misconstrued crime-fighting organization, a network that merges police data from authoritarian states and democracies, and a global adviser on how to handle criminal trends.

Secretary-General Jürgen Stock, a German who took office in 2014, has said he believes all police officers ultimately have the same goal: stopping criminals. The challenge, he said in an interview with The Associated Press, is that Interpol brings 195 very different countries into a network of databases of crimes and wanted fugitives.

Interpol has no police force of its own, no weapons stockpile, and certainly no fleet of helicopters to swoop in and pluck criminals off rooftops. Its power rests almost entirely in information shared by member nations.

Critics, even those who praise Stock’s tenure as one of a new openness for Interpol, say that’s exactly the problem. They accuse many countries, notably Russia and China, of abusing the red notice system, which flags people deemed fugitives to law enforcement worldwide and is one of Interpol’s most important tools.

“The red notices, the diffusions, all those sensitive instruments that on the one hand allow thousands of criminals being arrested all over the world every single year — almost every day we have these success stories — but on the other hand, making sure that these instruments are not used or even abused or misused for any political purposes, military purposes,” Stock told the AP.

Dissidents, minorities, and sometimes asylum-seekers get wrongly detained. In at least one case during Stock’s tenure, a Chinese Uyghur was detained in Morocco before his red notice was cancelled and remains at risk of extradition to China. Interpol is named in an American federal lawsuit filed in July by an Egyptian-American activist who was detained in the United Arab Emirates for what police told him was a red notice in November 2022.

Stock says cases like that are getting rarer under a review system he put in place in 2016, and now “inappropriate” notices and diffusions account for just 5% of the overall total. He said if Interpol didn’t exist, it would have to be created to handle modern transnational crime, a growing list which includes online child sex abuse, cyberattacks, environmental trafficking, human trafficking and terrorism.

Those crimes, according to Interpol specialists, are essentially on the rise at a much faster clip than Interpol’s budget. And for Interpol, and the man who describes himself as an “international public servant” at its helm, success is measured the quantity and integrity of information transmitted.

"El problema de Interpol es que todo es opaco", afirma Keith.

Interpol’s predecessor organization, the International Criminal Police Commission, was founded on Sept. 7, 1923, in Vienna, Austria. During World War II, the organization moved to Paris and ultimately to the French city of Lyon, where it remains.

Sus últimos años han sido difíciles.

Meng Hongwei , a former Chinese police official who became Interpol’s president in 2016, was detained during a work trip to Beijing in 2018 and accused of corruption in what appeared to be a Communist Party purge. His wife, who has since received asylum in France, remains livid that Interpol’s first communication on Meng’s disappearance was an announcement that he had resigned, effective immediately.

En enero de 2020, un tribunal anunció que había sido condenado a 13 años y seis meses de prisión acusado de aceptar más de $2 millones en sobornos.

In 2021, Interpol elected as president Maj. Gen. Ahmed Naser al-Raisi, who as inspector general at the United Arab Emirates’ interior ministry was accused by human rights groups of involvement in torture and arbitrary detentions in the UAE.

Stock has no control over the selection of president, which is a more ceremonial position than that of secretary-general. On Tuesday he described the allegations against al-Raisi as “an issue between the parties involved” and similarly described Meng’s detention as an internal Chinese legal affair.

Reconoció que la guerra de Rusia en Ucrania ha complicado aún más las cosas, pero no insiste en ello.

“Our operational work continues,” he said. “Global conflicts, a difficult situation, might have some impact on our work, but overall, the statistics are quite clear. We have more data in our databases than ever.”

Going forward, he hopes for still more. Cybercrime and evidence of the global market for child sex abuse make up a growing portion of Interpol’s caseload. Both have special units dedicated to them, because the crimes cross borders swiftly and invisibly.

Y no ve ninguna solución que no pase por que las fuerzas del orden amplíen el uso de la inteligencia artificial y los datos biométricos.

“We need to use artificial intelligence. There is no other way for law enforcement,” Stock said. “The criminals are already using it. We also have to use that.”

Esto podría plantear nuevos problemas éticos.

“Interpol is bound by its own rules to assume that everything a member government submits is legitimate,” said Ted Bromund, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation who has served as an expert witness in cases involving problematic red notices.

Stock lo reconoció.

“We are not policing our member countries,” he said. “What they are doing on a national level, how they apply their rules, how they use biometrics, how they use, in the future, artificial intelligence is up to the member countries, not up to Interpol.”

Este artículo se publicó por primera vez en The Independent el 6 de septiembre de 2023, puede consultar el artículo original aquí .

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