What is an INTERPOL Red Notice?

Almost everything painful about a Red Notice flows from the gap between what it is and what the world assumes it is.

Who issues a Red Notice, and on what basis?

A member country asks; INTERPOL’s General Secretariat publishes. In INTERPOL’s own words, a Red Notice “is based on an arrest warrant or court order issued by the judicial authorities in the requesting country.” The accusation inside it belongs entirely to that country. INTERPOL adds nothing but circulation — after a review against its Constitution and its Rules on the Processing of Data, which limit Red Notices to serious ordinary-law crimes and exclude matters “deriving from private disputes”.

What does a Red Notice actually do?

It asks every member country’s police to look out for a person and, if found, to detain them provisionally so the requesting country can seek extradition. Whether detention ever happens is decided elsewhere: “Member countries apply their own laws in deciding whether to arrest a person,” and “INTERPOL cannot compel the law enforcement authorities in any country to arrest someone who is the subject of a Red Notice.”

The point that governs your life at every border: whether a Red Notice leads to an arrest depends on the law of the country you are standing in — not on INTERPOL.

What a Red Notice is not

Not an international arrest warrant. INTERPOL says so in exactly those words; no such instrument exists. The detail is in Is a Red Notice an international arrest warrant?

Not a conviction. A person sought for prosecution “has not been convicted and should be considered innocent until proven guilty” — again INTERPOL’s own words.

Not necessarily public. Most notices are for police use only; an extract appears on INTERPOL’s website only when the requesting country asks for it. Absence from the public search proves almost nothing, and the quieter diffusion is never published at all.

Not unchallengeable. In 2025 INTERPOL’s own task force refused or cancelled 2,550 Red Notices and diffusions — a record, after 2,462 in 2024. Beyond that front door sits the applicant’s own remedy: a request to the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files, which logged 2,586 admissible requests in 2024, 45% of them seeking deletion.

The scale

INTERPOL published 19,568 new Red Notices in 2025, the most in its history, after 15,548 in 2024 — one of nine kinds of notice, and the only one whose purpose is arrest. The numbers, year by year, are on the CCF Tracker.

Related

• Is a Red Notice an international arrest warrant?
• Which INTERPOL rules get a Red Notice deleted?
• How many Red Notices get refused or deleted?