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International Criminal Police Organization
Common name	Interpol
Abbreviation	ICPO-INTERPOL
Motto	“Connecting police for a safer world”
Agency overview
Formed	1923; 95 years ago (1923)
Employees	756 (2013)[1]
Annual budget	€78 million (2013) €113 million (2017)
Jurisdictional structure
International agency
Countries	194 member countries
Map of International Criminal Police Organization's jurisdiction.
Governing body	INTERPOL General Assembly
Constituting instrument	ICPO-INTERPOL Constitution and General Regulations[2][3]
Headquarters	Lyon, France
Agency executives	Kim Jong Yang, President Alexander Prokopchuk, Vice president Jürgen Stock, Secretary General
Facilities
National Central Bureaus	194
Website
www.interpol.int
Languages (4) English Arabic French Spanish

Interpol headquarters in Lyon

The International Criminal Police Organization (ICPO-INTERPOL; French: Organisation internationale de police criminelle), more commonly known as Interpol, is the international organization that facilitates international police cooperation. It was established as the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC) in 1923; it chose INTERPOL as its telegraphic address in 1946, and made it its common name in 1956.^[4]

INTERPOL has an annual budget of around €113 million, most of which is provided through annual contributions by its membership of police forces in 194 countries (as of 2018^[update]). In 2013, the INTERPOL General Secretariat employed a staff of 756, representing 100 member countries.^[1] Its current Secretary-General is Jürgen Stock, the former deputy head of Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office. He replaced Ronald Noble, a former United States Under Secretary of the Treasury for Enforcement, who stepped down in November 2014 after serving 14 years.^[5] Interpol's current President is Kim Jong Yang of South Korea, replacing Meng Hongwei, Deputy Minister of Public Security of China, who is alleged to have resigned via an undersigned postal letter in October 2018 after his detention and disappearance by Chinese authorities on corruption charges.^[6]

To keep INTERPOL as politically neutral as possible, its charter forbids it from undertaking interventions or activities of a political, military, religious, or racial nature or involving itself in disputes over such matters.^[7] Its work focuses primarily on public safety and battling transnational crimes against humanity, child pornography, cybercrime, drug trafficking, environmental crime, genocide, human trafficking, illicit drug production,^[8]copyright infringement, missing people, illicit traffic in works of art, intellectual property crime, money laundering, organized crime, corruption, terrorism, war crimes, weapons smuggling, and white-collar crime.

History

In the first part of the 20th century, several efforts were taken to formalize international police cooperation, but they initially failed.^[9] Among these efforts were the First International Criminal Police Congress in Monaco in 1914, and the International Police Conference in New York in 1922. The Monaco Congress failed because it was organized by legal experts and political officials, not by police professionals, while the New York Conference failed to attract international attention.^{[citation needed]}

In 1923, a new initiative was taken at the International Criminal Police Congress in Vienna, where the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC) was successfully founded as the direct forerunner of INTERPOL. Founding members included police officials from Austria, Germany, Belgium, Poland, China, Egypt, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia.^[10] The United Kingdom joined in 1928.^[11] The United States did not join Interpol until 1938, although a US police officer unofficially attended the 1923 congress.^[12]

Following Anschluss in 1938, the organization fell under the control of Nazi Germany, and the Commission's headquarters were eventually moved to Berlin in 1942.^[13] Most members withdrew their support during this period.^[10] From 1938 to 1945, the presidents of the ICPC included Otto Steinhäusl, Reinhard Heydrich, Arthur Nebe, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner. All were generals in the SS, and Kaltenbrunner was the highest ranking SS officer executed after the Nuremberg Trials.

After the end of World War II in 1945, the organization was revived as the International Criminal Police Organization by officials from Belgium, France, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom. Its new headquarters were established in Saint-Cloud, a suburb of Paris. They remained there until 1989, when they were moved to their present location in Lyon.

Until the 1980s, INTERPOL did not intervene in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in accordance with Article 3 of its Charter, which prohibited intervention in "political" matters.^[14]

In July 2010, former INTERPOL President Jackie Selebi was found guilty of corruption by the South African High Court in Johannesburg for accepting bribes worth €156,000 from a drug trafficker.^[15] After being charged in January 2008, Selebi resigned as president of INTERPOL and was put on extended leave as National Police Commissioner of South Africa.^[16] He was temporarily replaced by Arturo Herrera Verdugo, the National Commissioner of Investigations Police of Chile and former vice president for the American Zone, who remained acting president until October 2008 and the appointment of Khoo Boon Hui.^[17]

On 8 November 2012, the 81st General Assembly closed with the election of Deputy Central Director of the French Judicial Police Mireille Ballestrazzi as the first female president of the organization.^[18][19]

In November 2016, Meng Hongwei, a politician from the People's Republic of China, was elected president during the 85th Interpol General Assembly, and was to serve in this capacity until 2020.^[20] At the end of September 2018, Meng was reported missing during a trip to China, after being "taken away" for questioning by "discipline authorities".^[21][22] Chinese police later confirmed that Meng had been arrested on charges of bribery as part of a national anti-corruption campaign.^[23] on 7 October 2018, INTERPOL announced that Meng had resigned his post with immediate effect and that the Presidency would be temporarily occupied by INTERPOL Senior Vice-President (Asia) Kim Jong Yang of South Korea. On 21 November 2018, INTERPOL's General Assembly elected Kim to fill the remainder of Meng's term,^[24] in a controversial election which saw accusations that the other candidate, Vice President Alexander Prokopchuk of Russia, had used INTERPOL notices to target critics of the Russian government.^[25]

Constitution

The role of INTERPOL is defined by the general provisions of its constitution.^[2]

Article 2 states that its role is:

1. To ensure and promote the widest possible mutual assistance between all criminal police authorities within the limits of the laws existing in the different countries and in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.


2. To establish and develop all institutions likely to contribute effectively to the prevention and suppression of ordinary law crimes.

Article 3 states:

It is strictly forbidden for the Organization to undertake any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character.

Methodology

Interpol ID card (front)

Contrary to frequent portrayals in popular culture, Interpol is not a supranational law enforcement agency and has no agents who are allowed to make arrests.^[26] Instead, it is an international organization that functions as a network of criminal law enforcement agencies from different countries. The organization thus functions as an administrative liaison among the law enforcement agencies of the member countries, providing communications and database assistance, assisted via the central headquarters in Lyon, France.^[27]

Interpol's collaborative form of cooperation is useful when fighting international crime because language, cultural and bureaucratic differences can make it difficult for police officials from different nations to work together. For example, if FBI special agents track a terrorist to Italy, they may not know whom to contact in the Polizia di Stato, if the Carabinieri have jurisdiction over some aspect of the case, or who in the Italian government must be notified of the FBI's involvement. The FBI can contact the Interpol National Central Bureau in Italy, which would act as a liaison between the United States and Italian law enforcement agencies.

Interpol's databases at the Lyon headquarters can assist law enforcement in fighting international crime.^[26] While national agencies have their own extensive crime databases, the information rarely extends beyond one nation's borders. Interpol's databases can track criminals and crime trends around the world, specifically by means of authorized collections of fingerprints and face photos, lists of wanted persons, DNA samples, and travel documents. Interpol's lost and stolen travel document database alone contains more than 12 million records. Officials at the headquarters also analyze these data and release information on crime trends to the member countries.

An encrypted Internet-based worldwide communications network allows Interpol agents and member countries to contact each other at any time. Known as I-24/7, the network offers constant access to Interpol's databases.^[26] While the National Central Bureaus are the primary access sites to the network, some member countries have expanded it to key areas such as airports and border access points. Member countries can also access each other's criminal databases via the I-24/7 system.

Interpol issued 13,637 notices in 2013, of which 8,857 were Red Notices, compared to 4,596 in 2008 and 2,037 in 2003. As of 2013^[update], there are currently 52,880 valid notices in circulation.^[1]

In the event of an international disaster, terrorist attack, or assassination, Interpol can send an Incident Response Team (IRT). IRTs can offer a range of expertise and database access to assist with victim identification, suspect identification, and the dissemination of information to other nations' law enforcement agencies. In addition, at the request of local authorities, they can act as a central command and logistics operation to coordinate other law enforcement agencies involved in a case. Such teams were deployed eight times in 2013.^[1] Interpol began issuing its own travel documents in 2009 with hopes that nations would remove visa requirements for individuals traveling for Interpol business, thereby improving response times.^[28] In September 2017, the organization voted to accept Palestine and the Solomon Islands as members.^[29]

Finances

In 2013, Interpol's operating income was €78 million, of which 68 percent was contributed by member countries, mostly in the form of statutory contributions (67 percent) and 26 percent came from externally funded projects, private foundations and commercial enterprises. Financial income and reimbursements made up the other six percent of the total.^[1] With the goal of enhancing the collaboration between Interpol and the private sector to support Interpol's missions, the Interpol Foundation for a Safer World was created in 2013. Although legally independent of Interpol, the relationship between the two is close enough for Interpol's president to obtain in 2015 the departure of HSBC CEO from the foundation board after the Swiss Leaks allegations.^[30]

From 2004 to 2010, Interpol's external auditors was the French Court of Audit.^[31][32] In November 2010, the Court of Audit was replaced by the Office of the Auditor General of Norway for a three-year term with an option for a further three years.^[33][34]

Criticism

Despite its politically neutral stance, some have criticized the agency for its role in arrests that critics contend were politically motivated. In the year 2008, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees pointed to the problem of arrests of refugees on the request of Interpol^[35] in connection with politically motivated charges. In their declaration, adopted in Oslo (2010),^[36] Monaco (2012),^[37] Istanbul (2013),^[38] and Baku (2014),^[39] the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly criticized some OSCE member States for their abuse of mechanisms of the international investigation and urged them to support the reform of Interpol in order to avoid politically motivated prosecution. The Istanbul Declaration of the OSCE cited specific cases of such prosecution, including those of the Russian activist Petr Silaev, financier William Browder, businessman Ilya Katsnelson, Belarusian politician Ales Michalevic, and Ukrainian politician Bohdan Danylyshyn. The resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe of 31 January 2014 criticizes the mechanisms of operation of the Commission for the Control of Interpol's files, in particular, non-adversarial procedures and unjust decisions.^[40][41] In 2014, PACE adopted a decision to thoroughly analyse the problem of the abuse of Interpol and to compile a special report on this matter.^[42] In May 2015, within the framework of the preparation of the report, the PACE Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights organized a hearing, during which both representatives of NGOs and Interpol had the opportunity to speak.^[43]

Organizations, such as the Open Dialog Foundation,^[44]Fair Trials International,^[45]Centre for Peace Studies,^[46] and International Consortium of Investigative Journalists,^[47] indicate that non-democratic states use Interpol in order to harass opposition politicians, journalists, human rights activists and businessmen. According to them, countries that frequently abuse the Interpol system include: China,^[48] Russia, Iran, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Tunisia.^[44][45][47]

The Open Dialog Foundation's report analysed 44 high-profile political cases which went through the Interpol system.^[44] A number of persons who have been granted refugee status in the EU and the US, including: Russian businessman Andrey Borodin,^[49] Chechen Arbi Bugaev,^[50] the Kazakh opposition politician Mukhtar Ablyazov^[51] and his associate Artur Trofimov,^[52] and Sri Lankan journalist Chandima Withana^[53] continue to remain on the public Interpol list. Some of the refugees remain on the list of Interpol even after courts have refused to extradite them to a non-democratic state (for example, Pavel Zabelin,^[54] a witness in the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Alexandr Pavlov,^[55] former security chief of the Kazakh oppositionist Ablyazov).

Interpol has recognized some requests to include persons on the wanted list as politically motivated, e.g., Indonesian activist Benny Wenda, Georgian politician Givi Targamadze,^[56] ex-president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili,^[57] ex-president of Honduras Manuel Zelaya Rosales;^[58] these persons have been removed from the wanted list. However, in most cases, Interpol removes a "red notice" against refugees only after an authoritarian state closes a criminal case or declares amnesty (for example, the cases of Russian activists and political refugees Petr Silaev, Denis Solopov, and Aleksey Makarov, as well as the Turkish sociologist and feminist Pinar Selek).^{[59][60][61][62]} The election of Meng Hongwei as president and Alexander Prokopchuk, a Russian, as vice president of Interpol for Europe drew criticism in western media and raised fears of Interpol accepting politically motivated requests from China and Russia.^[63][64][65]

Refugees who are included in the list of Interpol can be arrested when crossing the border.^[45] The procedure for filing an appeal with Interpol is a long and complex one. For example, the Venezuelan journalist Patricia Poleo and a colleague of Kazakh activist Ablyazov, Tatiana Paraskevich, who were granted refugee status, sought to overturn the politically motivated request for as long as one and a half years, and six months, respectively.^[66][67][68]

In 2013, Interpol was criticised over its multimillion-dollar deals with such private sector bodies as FIFA, Philip Morris, and the pharmaceutical industry. The criticism was mainly about the lack of transparency and potential conflicts of interest such as Codentify.^{[clarification needed][69][70][71][72][73][74]} After the 2015 FIFA scandal, the organization has severed ties with all the private-sector bodies that evoked such criticism, and has adopted a new and transparent financing framework.

Chinese authorities said former Interpol President Meng Hongwei is under investigation for bribery and corruption.

In 2016, Taiwan criticised Interpol for turning down their application to join the General Assembly as an observer.^[75] The United States supports Taiwan's participation, and the U.S. Congress passed legislation directing the Secretary of State to develop a strategy to obtain observer status for Taiwan.^[76]

According to a report by the Stockholm Center for Freedom that was issued on September 2017, Turkey has weaponized Interpol mechanisms to hunt down legitimate critics and opponents in violation of Interpol's own constitution. The report lists abuse cases where not only arrest warrants but also revocation of travel documents and passports were used by Turkey as persecution tools against critics and opponents. The harassment campaign targeted foreign companies as well.^[77]

On 25 July 2014, despite Interpol's Constitution prohibiting them from undertaking any intervention or activities of a political or military nature,^[78] the Ukrainian nationalist paramilitary leader Dmytro Yarosh was placed on Interpol's international wanted list at the request of Russian authorities,^[79] which made him the only person wanted internationally after the beginning of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia in 2014. For a long time, Interpol refused to place former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych on the wanted list as a suspect by the new Ukrainian government for the mass killing of protesters during Euromaidan.^[80][81] Yanukovych was eventually placed on the wanted list on 12 January 2015.^[82] However, on 16 July 2015, after an intervention of Joseph Hage Aaronson LLP, the British law firm hired by Yanukovych, the international arrest warrant against the former president of Ukraine was suspended pending further review.^[83] In December 2014, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) liquidated^{[clarification needed]} a sabotage and reconnaissance group that was led by a former agent of the Ukrainian Bureau of Interpol that also has family relations in the Ukrainian counter-intelligence agencies.^[84] In 2014, Russia made attempts to place Ukrainian politician Ihor Kolomoyskyi and Ukrainian civic activist Pavel Ushevets, subject to criminal persecution in Russia following his pro-Ukrainian art performance in Moscow, on the Interpol wanted list.^[85]

After the disappearance of Meng Hongwei, four American senators accused his presumptive successor, Alexander Prokopchuk, of abusing Red Notices and compared his election to "putting a fox in charge of the henhouse".^[86] A statement posted by the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union and signed by other NGO's raised concerns about his ability to use his Interpol position to silence Russia's critics.^[87] Russian politicians criticised the US political activity and called it interference: "This is interference in the election process of sorts, in the election to an international organisation. What else can you call it? This is a vivid example." Russian Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.^[88]

Reform of Interpol mechanisms

From 1–3 July 2015, Interpol organized a session of the Working Group on the Processing of Information, which was formed specifically in order to verify the mechanisms of information processing. The Working Group heard the recommendations of civil society as regards the reform of the international investigation system and promised to take them into account, in light of possible obstruction or refusal to file crime reports nationally.^[89]

Human rights organization, The Open Dialog Foundation, recommended that Interpol, in particular: create mechanism for the protection of rights of people having international refugee status; initiate closer cooperation of the Commission for the Control of Files with human rights NGO and experts on asylum and extradition; enforce sanctions for violations of Interpol's rules; strengthen cooperation with NGOs, the UN, OSCE, the PACE and the European Parliament.^[90]

Fair Trials International proposed to create effective remedies for individuals who are wanted under a Red Notice on unfair charges; to penalize nations which frequently abuse the Interpol system; to ensure more transparency of Interpol's work.^[91]

The Centre for Peace Studies also created recommendations for Interpol, in particular to delete Red Notices and Diffusions for people who were granted refugee status according to 1951 Refugee Convention issued by their countries of origin, and to establish an independent body to review Red Notices on a regular basis.^[46]

Emblem

INTERPOL Emblem

The current emblem of Interpol was adopted in 1950 and includes the following elements:^[4]

• the globe indicates worldwide activity


• the olive branches represent peace


• the sword represents police action


• the scales signify justice

Members

Membership as of November 2018, with acceptance date ^[92]

Sub-bureaus

UN member states without membership

Partially recognized states and entities without membership or sub-bureau status

Unrecognized states without membership or sub-bureau status

Offices

In addition to its General Secretariat headquarters in Lyon, Interpol maintains seven regional bureaus:^[1]

• 
  Buenos Aires, Argentina
  


• 
  San Salvador, El Salvador
  


• 
  Yaoundé, Cameroon
  


• 
  Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire
  


• 
  Nairobi, Kenya
  


• 
  Harare, Zimbabwe
  


• 
  Bangkok, Thailand (Liaison Office)


• 
  Belgium, Brussels Liaison office


• 
  Kingdom of the Netherlands, Den Haag Europol

Interpol's Command and Coordination Centres offer a 24/7 point of contact for national police forces seeking urgent information or facing a crisis. The original is in Lyon with a second in Buenos Aires added in September 2011. A third was opened in Singapore in September 2014.^[93]

Interpol opened a Special Representative Office to the United Nations in New York in 2004^[94] and to the European Union in Brussels in 2009.^[95]

The organization has constructed the Interpol Global Complex for Innovation (IGCI) in Singapore to act as its research and development facility, and a place of cooperation on digital crimes investigations. It was officially opened in April 2015, but had already become active beforehand. Most notably, a worldwide takedown of the SIMDA botnet infrastructure was coordinated and executed from IGCI's Cyber Fusion Centre in the weeks before the opening, as was revealed at the launch event.^[96]

Secretaries-general and presidents

Secretaries-general since organization's inception in 1923:

Country of origin	Name	In office
Austria	Oskar Dressler	1923–1946
France	Louis Ducloux	1946–1951
France	Marcel Sicot	1951–1963
France	Jean Népote	1963–1978
France	André Bossard	1978–1985
United Kingdom	Raymond Kendall	1985–2000
United States	Ronald Noble	2000–2014
Germany	Jürgen Stock	2014–present

Presidents since organization's inception in 1923:

Country of origin	Name	In office
Austria	Johann Schober	1923–1932
Austria	Franz Brandl	1932–1934
Austria	Eugen Seydel	1934–1935
Austria	Michael Skubl	1935–1938
Germany	Otto Steinhäusl	1938–1940
Germany	Reinhard Heydrich	1940–1942
Germany	Arthur Nebe	1942–1943
Germany	Ernst Kaltenbrunner	1943–1945
Belgium	Florent Louwage	1945–1956
Portugal	Agostinho Lourenço	1956–1960
United Kingdom	Sir Richard Jackson	1960–1963
Finland	Fjalar Jarva	1963–1964
Belgium	Firmin Franssen	1964–1968
West Germany	Paul Dickopf	1968–1972
Canada	William Leonard Higgitt	1972–1976
Sweden	Carl Persson	1976–1980
Philippines	Jolly Bugarin	1980–1984
United States	John Simpson	1984–1988
France	Ivan Barbot	1988–1992
Canada	Norman Inkster	1992–1994
Sweden	Björn Eriksson	1994–1996
Japan	Toshinori Kanemoto	1996–2000
Spain	Jesús Espigares Mira	2000–2004
South Africa	Jackie Selebi	2004–2008
Chile	Arturo Herrera Verdugo	2008 (acting)
Singapore	Khoo Boon Hui	2008–2012
France	Mireille Ballestrazzi	2012–2016
China	Meng Hongwei	2016–2018
South Korea	Kim Jong Yang	2018–present

See also

• Cybercrime


• 
  Europol, a similar EU-wide organization.


• Intelligence assessment


• International Criminal Court


• Interpol notice


• Interpol Terrorism Watch List


• Interpol Travel Document


• InterPortPolice


• UN Police

Notes

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Interpol.

• 
  Official website
  


• Interpol Foundation for a Safer World


• 
  Deflem, Mathieu. 2016. "Interpol." In The Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment, edited by Wesley G. Jennings. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.


• 
  Deflem, Mathieu. 2007. "International Police Cooperation Against Terrorism: Interpol and Europol in Comparison." Pp. 17-25 in Understanding and Responding to Terrorism, edited by H. Durmaz, B. Sevinc, A.S. Yayla, and S. Ekici. Amsterdam: IOS Press.

Coordinates: 45°46′56″N 4°50′54″E / 45.7822°N 4.8484°E / 45.7822; 4.8484