The CCF Elections Part 1: Every Seat in Play

All seven seats on the body that polices INTERPOL’s files are up for election in Hong Kong this winter.

When INTERPOL’s General Assembly meets this winter, it will choose the seven people who, for the coming years, decide whether the data INTERPOL holds on an individual stays or goes. All seven positions on the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files (CCF) fall vacant on 11 March 2027, when the current members’ terms expire. The seats will be filled by election at the 94th General Assembly in Hong Kong, from 30 November to 3 December 2026. INTERPOL has now published the list of 20 eligible candidates, nominated by member countries and vetted by the Executive Committee at its 229th session in June.

The CCF is the body individuals petition to see, correct or delete the data INTERPOL holds on them. In practice, it is how an abusive Red Notice or diffusion gets removed. A complete turnover of its membership means the people who will decide those applications are being chosen now.

When a member country’s request offends INTERPOL’s Constitution, it is the CCF’s Requests Chamber that says so and orders the data deleted. The quality of that scrutiny depends on who is in the room, which is why the Statute prescribes a blend of expertise across the seven seats: data protection, electronic data processing, international police cooperation, international criminal law, senior judicial or prosecutorial office, and human rights. The human rights seats do the heavy lifting in politically motivated cases. How they are filled is worth watching.

The field of 20 spans Argentina, Georgia, Cameroon, Italy, Morocco, France, the United Kingdom, Lebanon, Ukraine, Namibia, the United States, Tunisia, Mexico, Finland, India, Türkiye and the Netherlands. Several current members are standing again: Michel Forst of France, Teresa McHenry of the United States, Hamza Es Said of Morocco, Mohamed Kamara of Lebanon and Mohamed Elfadhel Miled of Tunisia. There are new names too. The human rights posts have drawn candidates from the United Kingdom, Mexico and Ukraine; the data protection posts from the United Kingdom, Italy and Ukraine.

We make no predictions. A candidate elected to one post is withdrawn from the rest, which makes the arithmetic hard to call in advance. But the balance of expertise that emerges will set the Commission’s direction for years. The mandates are deliberately staggered: newly elected members serve five years, re-elected members three, so the Commission is never emptied of experience in one go. What makes 2026 unusual is that every seat is in play at once.

Then there is the venue. Holding the election of INTERPOL’s data protection watchdog in Hong Kong sits uncomfortably beside well-documented concerns – we have written about them at length – that the Red Notice and diffusion systems are used against dissidents and critics. The choice of venue for renewing the body that guards against political misuse is a striking piece of scheduling, and a reminder of why the independence and human rights literacy of the incoming Commission matter.

For anyone with a live application before the CCF, or contemplating one, nothing changes for now: the Commission continues its work and existing cases proceed under the current procedure.

The longer view is different. The members elected this winter inherit a growing caseload, a newly launched online portal and an unresolved argument about what an effective remedy in data protection law requires. How rigorously they read Article 3, how seriously they weigh human rights evidence, how willing they are to look behind a sanitised case file – that will do more for the fairness of the system than any rule change.

Elections without campaigns are easy to miss. This one deserves an audience. We will follow the process to Hong Kong and report once the new Commission is seated.