The short answer. Seven people elected in Hong Kong this December. Every current member's mandate ends on 11 March 2027, and the 94th General Assembly fills all seven seats by secret ballot from nineteen candidates nominated by member countries and declared eligible by the Executive Committee in June 2026. Five sitting members are standing again. Whoever wins reads the deletion requests filed now.
The seats
Article 8 of the Statute fixes the composition. The Supervisory and Advisory Chamber holds the Chairperson, a data-protection expert and an electronic data processing expert. The Requests Chamber — which decides access and deletion requests — holds five lawyers: data protection, international police cooperation, international criminal law, human rights, and a senior judicial or prosecutorial career. Members must be of different nationalities; the Chairperson is chosen by all members from the Requests Chamber, needing five votes (Article 7; Rule 6).
The candidates
Standing again are the Chairperson, Teresa McHenry of the United States, for three categories; the Vice-Chairperson, Mohamed Kamara of Lebanon, also for three; Hamza Es-Said of Morocco for the judicial seat; Michel Forst of France for human rights; and Mohamed Elfadhel Miled of Tunisia for electronic data processing. The two data-protection members, Yves Poullet and Susie Alegre, are not on the list. The fourteen newcomers include two candidates each from Italy, Ukraine and the United Kingdom — only one per country can sit — and candidates from Argentina, Georgia, Cameroon, Namibia, Mexico, Finland, India and the Netherlands. A candidate elected to one post drops off the ballot for the others.
Why it is more than names
The Statute protects the office: members serve in their personal capacity and may neither solicit nor accept instructions from any government (Article 11); only the General Assembly can dismiss them (Article 14); their remuneration cannot be cut mid-term (Article 13). The Operating Rules add that a member represents neither administration nor National Central Bureau, and must withdraw from any case whose data come from their own country (Rules 1 and 2). That recusal rule is the practical point: the nationalities elected in December decide which countries’ notices are heard by six members rather than seven. Members are not full time; a 19-strong Secretariat prepares their files.
What it means for your request
A request filed today is unlikely to be examined before 2027, so the people who decide it are being chosen now, under a Statute amended last year, with national courts treating the Commission as the remedy that justifies INTERPOL’s immunity. The composition changes nothing in the rules a file must meet. It changes who weighs the evidence — and whether the member who knows your requesting country best is in the room or outside it.
Related
- What is INTERPOL’s CCF, and what can it do?
- When does the CCF actually decide your case?
- What will INTERPOL’s General Assembly decide in Hong Kong?
- INTERPOL — Elections of the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL's Files: list of eligible candidates — interpol.int
- INTERPOL — Information note about CCF elections — interpol.int
- Statute of the CCF, Articles 7 to 14 — interpol.int
- CCF — Operating Rules, as amended on 26 March 2026, Rules 1, 2, 3, 3A, 6 and 20 — interpol.int
- INTERPOL — About the CCF: composition of the Commission — interpol.int
- CCF Annual Activity Report 2024, paragraphs 19, 21 and 23 — interpol.int
- INTERPOL — 94th INTERPOL General Assembly, 30 November to 3 December 2026 — interpol.int
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