Reform on Paper: What Freedom House’s 2025 Data Tells Us About INTERPOL

Freedom House published Collaboration and Resistance: Tracking Transnational Repression in 2025 this week. The wider findings are stark: 126 new incidents of physical, direct transnational repression recorded in 2025, 1,375 cases in the database since 2014, and six new perpetrator states added to the list, including Georgia, Kenya and Tanzania. More than a quarter of the world’s governments now use these tactics. For readers of this blog, it is the report’s dedicated section on INTERPOL that is of most interest.

Freedom House recorded 11 incidents in 2025 in which Red Notices or diffusions were used as instruments of transnational repression. Egypt, Kuwait and Turkmenistan are named as governments that contravened Article 3 of the INTERPOL Constitution by pursuing regime opponents abroad on political grounds. The figure of 11 is, as anyone working these cases knows, a serious understatement. It captures only those incidents visible enough to be documented by researchers and human rights organisations. The true scale includes the diffusions that never surface publicly, the notices that trigger silent visa refusals, the bank account closures attributed vaguely to “compliance,” and the countless subjects who learn of their status only when stopped at a border.

The report identifies the structural cause, and one which we have written about before. The Notices and Diffusion Task Force, which reviews incoming submissions, has a staff of forty-five tasked with analysing an average of over 10,000 Red Notices annually. The Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files operates with resources equally inadequate to its caseload. The underlying problem is not that the CCF gets its decisions wrong. It is that the volume of politically motivated submissions exceeds the capacity of the bodies designed to filter them, and that INTERPOL’s Rules on the Processing of Data extend a presumption of good faith to member-state submissions that cannot be sustained against the documented record of the worst perpetrator states.

The 2025 cases bear this out. In March, Sudanese opposition politician Yassir Arman was detained at Nairobi airport on a Red Notice requested by Sudan. Kenyan authorities recognised the political character of the notice within a day and released him. The outcome was correct. The system, however, delivered him to detention in the first place. In May, INTERPOL confirmed it had issued Red Notices against two Spain-based Salvadoran lawyers, Ivania Cruz and Rudy Joya, who had represented human rights defenders persecuted by the Bukele government. The notices were eventually revoked as politically motivated, but not before both lawyers faced extradition proceedings in Spain. They received asylum in Spain in 2026. UN experts identified the notices as a “direct connection” to their legitimate human rights work.

In September, Aysoltan Niyazova of Pussy Riot was detained on the Polish-Lithuanian border on a Turkmen-requested Red Notice that had apparently never been deleted after her earlier successful challenge in Croatia in 2022. INTERPOL invalidated the notice in February 2026, twenty-four years after it was first issued. The case shows a problem we have returned to on this blog before: the lack of transparency around updates to existing notices, the absence of effective mechanisms to ensure removal is enforced across the General Secretariat’s systems, and the reliance on the subject to discover and challenge residual entries.

The most significant data point in the report comes from the BBC’s January 2026 investigation, which it cites. Leaked internal documents showed that, even after INTERPOL introduced additional checks on Russian requests following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, approximately 90 per cent of Kremlin requests continued to be approved. When targeted individuals challenged those notices, roughly half were removed. The gap between initial approval and post-challenge removal is the clearest available measure of false positives in the system. It is not a processing inefficiency. It is a structural concession to states that have made weaponisation of the system a foreign policy tool.

Freedom House’s policy recommendations on INTERPOL are straightforward and correct. Member states should increase funding to the NDTF and the CCF. Enhanced scrutiny should apply to submissions from known perpetrator states. The default presumption of good faith needs recalibration against the evidential record. None of this is novel. What is new is the accumulation of documented cases, now at a point where the ordinary diplomatic reticence of INTERPOL member states is increasingly difficult to defend.

The wider picture is shifting. The G7 Leaders’ Statement on Transnational Repression in June 2025 recognised the threat. The European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights adopted a resolution in November. The OHCHR published its first Civic Space Brief dedicated to the issue. Each of these non-binding instruments creates political space for the harder work of institutional reform. INTERPOL reform is part of that work.

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