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Readers of this blog will be very familiar with the pattern. A dissident is stopped at an airport on a warrant issued by the government she fled. A businessman finds his accounts frozen years after a better-connected rival took over his company in murky circumstances. Much of our work at Red Notice Monitor exists because these stories keep coming and also because the system that produces them remains poorly understood.
In an attempt to demystify the system, we have written a book.
INTERPOL Law and Practice will be published by Thomson Reuters on 23 September 2026. It runs from the organisation’s history and structure, through the substantive law applied by the Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files (CCF), to the mechanics of bringing a case before it. Extradition, asylum and reform each have a chapter of their own.
The organisation the book describes is not the one most people imagine. Interpol has no agents and makes no arrests. It is an information exchange connecting 196 member countries, whose databases are searched some 22 million times a day. Its power lies in what it circulates: a Red Notice published in Lyon can close borders and bank accounts on the other side of the world within hours.
The practical core of the book is a long chapter organised around the questions clients and practitioners ask in practice. How do you find out whether a notice exists? Should you travel in the meantime? What does an application to the CCF involve, how long does it really take, and what happens when the answer is no? The authors answer from their own case files and from anonymised CCF decisions, and the appendices reproduce the key legal texts alongside model application documents.
The stance will be familiar to anyone who reads this site. As we’ve said on many occasions, we want to be a critical friend to Interpol and an advocate for those subject to improper Red Notices. Police cooperation across borders is incredibly important and borders should not give refuge for serious criminals. The system is far from perfect, and anyone who’s touched by it knows that notices are relatively easy to issue but take years to delete.
Over the coming weeks we will publish a short series drawing on the book: the numbers behind the growth of the notice system, the questions clients ask most often, the test Interpol applies to political cases, the position of refugees, and the case for reform.
INTERPOL Law and Practice by Rhys Davies and Ben Keith is published by Thomson Reuters on 23 September 2026 and can be pre-ordered now from Sweet & Maxwell.
Interpol Silver Notices one year on.
