As Interpol celebrates its centenary, it faces the difficult task of stopping criminals while ensuring its famous red notices are not misused to arrest dissidents.
This week, more than a thousand police and law enforcement officers from around the world gathered for Interpol’s general assembly in Vienna, the Austrian city where the organization was founded. “We have gone from 20 member states in 1923 to 196 today,” Jürgen Stock, the secretary general of Interpol, which is currently headquartered in the French city of Lyon, told AFP.
With its famous red alerts, Interpol “guarantees that there are no safe havens for criminals, both in the physical world and online,” the 64-year-old German explained. But the organization was forced to tighten controls after misuse of its alert system led to criticism.
Mafia and taboos
While center As a global information-sharing platform, Interpol helps member states “connect the dots between continents” by identifying and locating criminals, Stock explains.
Interpol’s database contains 125 million police files and receives approximately 16 million searches per day.
The war leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic – captured in 2008 after being on the run for almost thirteen years – and the serial killer Frenchman Charles Sobhraj is among the most spectacular arrests made by Interpol.
Global police have also helped Italy crack down on the country’s richest and most powerful mafia in recent years: the ‘Ndrangheta.
In May, Interpol launched an unprecedented campaign to identify 22 women believed to have been murdered in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. By making previously confidential information public, Rita Roberts, who was murdered in 1992, was finally identified this year when a member of her family recognized her tattoo.
Tight controls
Despite its successes, Interpol’s red alert system is regularly accused of being abused by member states to track political dissidents.
Shortly after taking office in 2014, Stock decided to tackle the problem by creating a team of four dozen experts to investigate reports of wanted suspects before they were published.
“We are monitoring the geopolitical situation around the world and making these compliance assessments,” Stock explained, highlighting the system’s “robust mechanism.”
In 2022, only 1,465 notifications were rejected or withdrawn before publication, compared to a total of approximately 70 thousand valid notifications. “If a case is predominantly political or has a military or religious component, Interpol is off the air and we take the matter very seriously,” Stock emphasizes. In addition, it introduced “a new refugee policy” to protect those granted this status.
Underfunded organization
A handful of countries are currently under enhanced surveillance by Interpol, including Russia, which has been unable to send messages directly to other member states since invading Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The lack of a “globally accepted definition of what terrorism is” means mistakes can occur, Stock admitted.
French journalist Mathieu Martinière, who recently published an in-depth investigation into Interpol with his German colleague Robert Schmidt, told AFP that “the situation has improved, but more than a hundred innocent people still slip through the net every year and can be extradited and subsequently arrested.”
One of the biggest problems Interpol faces is the “lack of staff in an underfunded organization.” The election of UAE General Ahmed Naser al-Raisi – who is under investigation in France for complicity in torture – as president of Interpol in 2021 also raised concerns.
The book by Mathieu Martinière and Robert Schmidt, Interpol: l’survey, published in October, also explores the moment the Nazis took control of the organization following the annexation of Adolf Hitler’s native Austria. The then president of Interpol, Austrian Ernst Kaltenbrunner, was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials and executed in 1946.
Until early this year, the names of the Nazi presidents of Interpol were not on the website, in an attempt to “obscure the story,” Martinière explains. Stock guarantees that this was an inadvertent mistake, which has since been corrected.
IN NUMBERS
196
To land. When Interpol was founded in 1923, it started with twenty members. Today there are 196, sharing information to identify and locate criminals.
70 thousand
Criminals. Interpol currently has more than 70,000 criminals on red alert. In 2022, only 1,465 notifications were rejected or canceled before publication.
155 million
Budget. In 2022, Interpol had a budget of 155 million euros, a modest amount that contrasts with the almost 800 billion that organized crime generates annually, according to the UN.
Source: DN
