The Weekly Standart: “How Russia uses Interpol to harass opponents”.
“Contrary to what you see in the movies, Interpol isn’t an international police force. It doesn’t arrest anyone. It’s more like a global bulletin board for national law enforcement agencies. Every country is a member except North Korea. And one of the privileges of membership is that you can request that Interpol issue a “Red Notice,” which asks other members to detain and extradite a wanted individual”.
Pavel Ivlev, a Russian lawyer and now a refugee in the United States, was also charged (as the Red Notice puts it, with “large scale fraud”) in connection with Yukos.
And that’s the problem: A lot of Interpol’s members aren’t trustworthy. There is an appeal procedure through the Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files (CCF), but in 2013 the CCF issued only 122 conclusions. Most Red Notice requests are granted in hours, the process is electronic, and it requires no evidence: All you have to do is assert that a valid warrant exists.
Panel discussion: Abuse of the INTERPOL Red Notices System by the Russian Federation
Ted Bromund, Kamilla Mehtiyeva, Alexander Smoljanski, Ilya Katsnelson, Rebecca Shaeffer and Pavel Ivlev
discussed the abuses of the INTERPOL Red Notices’ system.
