Interpol at 100: A mixed legacy of hunting fugitives and merging police data from 195 countries
police data from authoritarian states and democracies, and a global adviser on how to handle criminal trends.
Secretary-General Jurgen Stock, a German who took office in 2014, has said he believes all police officers ultimately have the same goal: stopping criminals. The challenge, he said in an interview with The Associated Press, is that Interpol brings 195 very different countries into a network of databases of crimes and wanted fugitives.
Interpol has no police force of its own, no weapons stockpile, and certainly no fleet of helicopters to swoop in and pluck criminals off rooftops.
Its power rests almost entirely in information shared by member nations.
Critics, even those who praise Stock's tenure as one of a new openness for Interpol, say that's exactly the problem. They accuse many countries, notably Russia and China, of abusing the red notice system, which flags people deemed fugitives to law enforcement worldwide and is one of Interpol's most important tools.
«The red notices, the diffusions, all those sensitive instruments that on the one hand allow thousands of criminals being arrested all over the world every single year — almost every day we have these success stories — but on the other hand, making sure that these instruments are not used or even abused or misused for any political purposes, military purposes,» Stock told the AP.
Dissidents, minorities, and sometimes asylum-seekers get wrongly detained.
In at least one case during Stock's tenure, a Chinese Uyghur was detained in Morocco before his red notice was cancelled and remains at risk of extradition to China. Interpol is named in an American federal lawsuit filed in July by an Egyptian-American activist who was detained in the United Arab Emirates
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