The short answer. A Blue Notice is INTERPOL's request "to collect additional information about a person's identity, location or activities in relation to a criminal investigation." It asks nobody to arrest anyone. But it marks you as a person of interest in 196 countries, it is often the step before a Red Notice, and it is data in INTERPOL's system — tested by the same rules and challenged through the same Commission.
The Red Notice gets the headlines. The Blue Notice gathers what the Red Notice is later built on.
The nine notices, and where blue sits
INTERPOL’s notices are “international requests for cooperation or alerts allowing police in member countries to share critical crime-related information.” Nine kinds exist. Red seeks “the location and arrest of persons wanted for prosecution or to serve a sentence”. Blue seeks information. Yellow finds missing persons; Black identifies bodies; Green warns of a person’s criminal activities; Orange warns of an imminent threat; Purple shares criminals’ methods; the UN Special Notice serves Security Council sanctions; the new Silver Notice traces assets. Only the Red Notice asks for an arrest. The Blue Notice asks every country’s police to look, and report back.
What a Blue Notice does to a person
Nothing visible, usually. You are not detained at a border on a Blue Notice; you are noted, and the requesting country learns where you were and what document you carried. The purpose is an investigation that has not yet produced a warrant — which is why it matters: a country that cannot meet the conditions for a Red Notice — a serious ordinary-law crime, a warrant, the penalty threshold — can still ask the world to watch you while it tries.
A Blue Notice is a question asked of 196 police forces. The answers become the file that a Red Notice is later built on.
The same rules apply
The compliance review applies to every notice: INTERPOL’s task force refused or cancelled 190 Blue Notices and diffusions in 2025, beside 2,550 Red. The Constitution’s Article 3 forbids political, military, religious or racial matters whatever the colour; Article 12 of the data rules requires accuracy and relevance; and the private-dispute exclusion is about the subject matter, not the label. A Blue Notice issued to locate a former business partner in a commercial dispute is as non-compliant as the Red Notice that would follow.
Challenging it
The Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files has “exclusive power” over “data processed in the INTERPOL Information System” — a Blue Notice included. The route is identical: an access request, then correction or deletion mapped to the rule it breaches. Because a Blue Notice usually exists before any warrant, challenging it is the closest thing INTERPOL’s system offers to acting before a Red Notice is issued: the investigation’s premise is tested while it is still a question, and your evidence is on record if the question ever becomes an arrest request.
Related
- What is an INTERPOL diffusion?
- Can you act before a Red Notice is issued?
- What is a Silver Notice, and why does it matter?
- INTERPOL — About Notices — interpol.int
- INTERPOL — Red Notices — interpol.int
- INTERPOL — notice statistics, December 2025: refusals and cancellations by ground, 2017–2025 (Compliance and review, — interpol.int
- INTERPOL's Rules on the Processing of Data, Articles 12 and 83 — interpol.int
- Constitution of INTERPOL, Articles 2 and 3 — interpol.int
- Statute of the CCF, Articles 28 and 29 — interpol.int
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