What is INTERPOL's CCF, and what can it do?

For anyone with a Red Notice, the CCF is the only court that matters — and it is not a court.

What the CCF is

It exists because INTERPOL’s Constitution says it must: Article 36 creates an independent body to check that personal data processed by the Organization complies with its rules. The Commission has seven members “elected from among persons of high moral character, impartiality and integrity,” with legal, data-protection and police expertise, serving five-year terms. It has three functions — supervisory, advisory, and a processing role for individual requests — and it is the third that touches lives.

What it can decide

Article 29 of its Statute gives any person the right to apply to it directly; Article 30 says there is no charge. The Requests Chamber tests challenged data against INTERPOL’s own rules: the Constitution’s ban on political, military, religious and racial matters, its human-rights commitment, and the Rules on the Processing of Data. Before deciding, it “shall seek information or clarification from the source of the data and/or the General Secretariat” — so the country that issued the notice gets its say.

Then Article 38: “The decisions of the Requests Chamber shall be final and binding on the Organization.” When the CCF orders deletion, INTERPOL deletes; its General Secretariat implements a decision within a month.

The CCF cannot judge guilt or innocence. It judges one thing: whether INTERPOL is allowed to hold the data at all.

What it cannot do

It cannot cancel a national arrest warrant, stop an extradition, or rule on the merits of a criminal case. It can only remove INTERPOL’s circulation of the case — which, for most people, is the part that reaches across borders. Nor can it move fast: it aims to decide access requests within four months and deletion requests within nine, and in 2024 it missed the first target in 70% of cases and the second in 30%.

The scale it works at

In 2024 the Commission received 2,586 admissible requests, “the highest number ever recorded,” 45% of them seeking deletion — and closed 2,717, also a record. Behind that stood a secretariat of nineteen full-time staff. INTERPOL’s General Assembly voted more resources in November 2024, and four new staff arrived in late 2025; the Chair still warned the 2025 Assembly that delays “will be even worse” before they improve. Every figure is tracked on the CCF Tracker.

How a request is argued, in ten pages, is in What is the CCF’s ten-page rule?

Related

• How do I find out if I have a Red Notice?
• Which INTERPOL rules get a Red Notice deleted?
• How long does Red Notice deletion take?