Who will police Interpol?

MATTHEW HEDGES, a British doctoral student, says he spent nearly seven months mostly in solitary confinement in a prison in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). He tells of being drugged, interrogated, blindfolded and forced to stand all day in manacles. He falsely confessed to being a spy just to end the agony, he says. He was eventually pardoned and freed. To his horror, the man he accuses of complicity in his torture, Ahmed Naser al-Raisi, the inspector-general of the UAE interior ministry at the time, who was in charge of prisons, was neither sacked nor demoted. The UAE denies the claims and on November 25th Mr al-Raisi was elected Interpol’s new president.

Interpol was set up to help countries’ police forces work together to catch crooks. It has an unfortunate habit of employing them instead. Jackie Selebi, its president from 2004 to 2008, was later sentenced to 15 years in jail for corruption in his native South Africa. Meng Hongwei, the boss from 2016 to 2018, was summoned back to China, disappeared, reappeared in the dock and got 13-and-a-half years for bribery. (His wife says he was framed.) A cynic might ask: whose side is Interpol on?

The agency does not arrest people, but is essentially a communications hub. Its main tool is the “red notice”, which is akin to an international arrest warrant. Member states give Interpol the names of criminals on the lam and ask for a red notice. This used to be rare. In 2001 fewer than 1,500 were issued. That figure has grown more than sevenfold. In all, more than 66,000 red notices are active. Most are for real criminals, but autocratic regimes have found they can also be used to persecute exiled dissidents.

Russia, responsible for 43% of the 7,500 red notices that have been made public, is a serial abuser. Petr Silaev, a green activist who found asylum in Finland, was accused of “hooliganism”, arrested in Spain and had to fight to avoid extradition to Russia. China is another. In July a Uyghur living in Turkey was detained in Morocco on the basis of an Interpol red notice. Democracies seldom hand over dissidents to autocratic regimes, but other autocrats have no such qualms. And red notices can do harm even without extradition. They can ruin careers and make it harder to board a plane or open a bank account. Many people wrongly assume that a red notice stems from a thorough investigation by an international body, rather than, say, a despot’s secret police.

Interpol staff are trying harder to weed out the most egregious requests. Reportedly, Turkish officials attempted to upload the names of 60,000 Gulenists onto Interpol’s database, but were rebuffed. (Members of this Islamist movement have been especially persecuted in Turkey since some of them backed a coup in 2016.) American senators introduced a bill in May that would require additional checks before American police act on Interpol notices.

But more is needed. For a start, Interpol’s president should be chosen in an open vote. Today’s secret ballots of all 195 member states make it hard to spot arm-twisting. That would still leave autocratic regimes with a lot of influence. So internal reforms are needed, too.

Requests for red notices from abusers should be subject to strict scrutiny. Currently there is not much, and it is opaque. Persistent abusers should be shut out. In 2012 Interpol blocked Syria’s access to its databases, but in October it inexplicably let the blood-drenched regime back in. Making Interpol more transparent and rigorous will cost money. Its annual budget is just €145m ($164m)—less than that of the New Orleans police department. Rich democracies should chip in more.

Interpol belongs to the machinery of international governance, an area of competition between democracies and autocracies. It is supposed to bolster the rule of law, by helping catch real globetrotting criminals. It must do more to resist being captured by dictators and autocrats who would like to turn it into a branch of their own secret police. ■