What does Fair Trials think of INTERPOL?

Who is Fair Trials?

A fair-trial NGO in London, Brussels and Washington. Its 2013 report, Strengthening respect for human rights, strengthening INTERPOL, was built from its own cases: exiled activists and refugees pursued through INTERPOL by the governments they had fled. It has since testified in Washington and persuaded two US appeal courts that a Red Notice alone does not establish a serious crime. Its campaign page, updated August 2026, says it is not currently taking individual cases.

What did it say was wrong?

In 2013, two things. The filter: INTERPOL assumed good faith and seemed not to review requests rigorously; its reading of Article 3 seemed out of step with asylum and extradition law; and draft Red Notices went worldwide before the General Secretariat checked them. The remedy: INTERPOL is immune from national courts, and the CCF gave no reasons, took years and bound nobody. It asked for a complaints chamber, adversarial proceedings with disclosure, hearings, binding reasoned decisions and a right of challenge.

What does it think has changed?

Much of that. Its 2018 report, Dismantling the Tools of Oppression, credits INTERPOL with a refugee policy — whose full text INTERPOL has never published, though Fair Trials has — with pre-publication vetting by a task force, and with a rebuilt Commission: a Requests Chamber and binding, reasoned decisions. In 2022 INTERPOL posted refusal figures, a Fair Trials demand since 2018. It read them as roughly 1,000 Red Notices and diffusions rejected or deleted a year, about 150 on human-rights grounds and several hundred as political — a sign the filter works, and “just the tip of the iceberg”. INTERPOL’s 2025 figure, 2,550, is in an earlier post.

What does it still want?

Three things: rigorous checks on every alert, since thirty to forty task-force staff vet around ten thousand new Red Notices a year and diffusions are checked only after they are sent; transparency about how many requests arrive and how many fail; and member countries that protect people on abusive alerts rather than arrest them. Two of its 2013 asks remain unmet: you do not see the requesting country’s answer, and there is no appeal.

What should a subject take from it?

One sentence from its toolkit: the CCF “cannot decide whether someone is guilty or innocent”. A request is argued on INTERPOL’s rules — Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution, Articles 76, 82 and 83 of the data rules — not on the charge. That is the premise of every deletion that works.

Related

• How many Red Notices get refused or deleted?
• Can INTERPOL circulate a Red Notice against a refugee?
• What is INTERPOL’s Article 3, the “political character” rule?