64 International The Economist December 4th 2021
of trying. Mr Meng sought to take on addi
tional powers, they say, but faced push
back from bureaucrats.
The damage to Interpol’s brand has real
world consequences, however. “If your
reputation is bad, you will lose trust, and
without trust you cannot have coopera
tion,” says Sarka Havrankova, the agency’s
vicepresident for Europe, who ran against
Mr Raisi. The risk, she says, is that national
police agencies will look for other ways to
cooperate, such as through Europol, a re
gional grouping, undermining the inter
national policing system. “You need to
have a global network,” says a former Inter
pol official, “because you never know
where criminals will go.”
Interpol’s reputation was already fray
ing. Mr Meng, the first Chinese national to
be elected president, was sentenced to 13
andahalf years in jail in 2020 after plead
ing guilty to bribery. His wife says the
charges against him were politically moti
vated. Years earlier, Jackie Selebi, a South
African police commissioner and Inter
pol’s first African leader, was convicted of
taking bribes from a drugtrafficker. More
recently, a Chilean official elected to the
executive committee in 2019 was placed
under house arrest in Santiago over claims
he embezzled $146m in public funds.
Attempts by authoritarian govern
ments to use Interpol to hound or detain
opponents abroad also cast a cloud over
the agency. Russia has been the most seri
ous offender, accounting for nearly 43% of
all public red notices. (Only 7,500 of the
66,000 red notices in circulation today are
made public. The rest are available only to
lawenforcement officials.) Of these, many
are for Russian Muslims accused of terror
offences. Some are guilty of nothing more
than wiring money abroad to friends or rel
atives whom Russia has designated as ter
rorists, says Alexei Obolenets, a lawyer.
Russia has also repeatedly asked Inter
pol to issue red notices against Kremlin
critics, including Bill Browder, a British fi
nancier, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a for
mer oligarch. It almost got Mr Browder ex
tradited in 2018 when Spanish police ar
rested him in Madrid, but he was soon re
leased. (Interpol says he was never issued a
red notice, though in 2017 he was briefly
the subject of another type of Interpol
alert.) Interpol has also declined Russian
requests to place Mr Khodorkovsky, who
lives in exile in London, on its wanted list.
Turkey, which hosted this year’s Inter
pol assembly, has also been trying. The
country flooded Interpol with rednotice
requests against exiled members of the Gu
len movement, a secretive Islamic group
blamed for a violent coup attempt in 2016.
(Tens of thousands of Gulenists, including
teachers, lawyers and charity workers,
have been arrested in Turkey.) The agency
recently acknowledged it had rejected almost 800 Turkish requests. At one point
Turkish officials reportedly attempted
(and failed) to upload the names of 60,000
people onto the agency’s database. Unde
terred, Turkish agents have turned to kid
napping Gulen sympathisers abroad and
spiriting them back to Turkey. Freedom
House, an American watchdog, lists at
least 58 such renditions from 17 countries.
China, too, is a repeat offender. In 2006
Huseyin Celil, a Uyghur who had fled to
Canada, was arrested in Uzbekistan on an
Interpol warrant and delivered to China,
where he remains in prison on dubious
terror charges. In July Idris Hasan, a Uygh
ur living in Turkey, was detained in Moroc
co on the basis of a red notice.
Safeguard Defenders, a civilrights
group, says China’s use of red notices for
critics and corruption suspects appears to
have increased dramatically under Presi
dent Xi Jinping. In many cases Interpol has
stood its ground. The red notice for Mr Ha
san was suspended in August, though he
continues to fight extradition. China had
probably hoped that Mr Meng, who was
head of Interpol at the time, would keep
such red notices in place, and help reel in
more dissidents. Mr Meng’s failure to
please his bosses in Beijing may have con
tributed to his own fall from grace.
The uaehas followed the same game
plan. Several foreigners who helped Prin
cess Latifa, the daughter of Dubai’s ruler,
try to escape house arrest imposed by her
father in 2018, say they were subsequently
the subject of Interpol red notices, which
were later withdrawn.
Interpol has made some reforms, nota
bly to the process of vetting rednotice re
quests. Such notices can no longer be is
sued against people whom a memberstate
has recognised as refugees. At its meeting
in Istanbul, the organisation also beefed
up eligibility criteria for candidates to its
executive committee. But elections to Interpol’s top post continue to be opaque.
Candidates for the presidency are not for
mally announced until the start of the gen
eral assembly, which ensures they cannot
be properly assessed by delegates or the
wider public. Voting is by secret ballot,
which makes backroom deals inevitable.
China is known to use promises of in
vestment and aid to get its candidates
elected to posts in international bodies.
The uaeis suspected of having done so to
drum up votes for Mr Raisi. Over the sum
mer he toured Africa, meeting the presi
dents of Burkina Faso, the Gambia, Guinea,
GuineaBissau and Senegal, and publicly
promising them support. Underfunded, under fire
Interpol is poorly funded for an agency
with such broad and complex responsibil
ities. Its budget for this year is a mere
€145m ($164m), of which €62m comes from
statutory contributions (America, Germa
ny and Japan give the most). In the past, In
terpol entered into commercial deals to
make up for a shortfall. In 2015, it was
forced to suspend a €20m partnership with
fifa, the scandalplagued global body that
governs football. It was related to, of all
things, fighting corruption. Three years
before that, it accepted a €15m grant from
Philip Morris, a tobacco company, to help
fight fake cigarettes. Interpol has since
weaned itself off privatesector money. De
legates in Istanbul voted to increase its
budget by about 15% in real terms over the
next three years.
But the funding remains inadequate,
say experts, especially given the increasing
workload. Interpol issued fewer than 1,500
red notices in 2001. Last year, it issued
11,000. “The numbers suggest there is not
enough capacity,” says Bruno Min of Fair
Trials, another watchdog. The agency does
not publish data on rejected rednotice re
quests. “We don’t have any idea whether
these systems of screening [requests] are
actually working,” says Mr Min.
The organisation is dogged by claims
that authoritarian countries trade contri
butions for influence. In 2017, the uae
pledged €50m to Interpol’s Foundation for
a Safer World, one of the biggest donations
in the agency’s history. A report by Sir Da
vid CalvertSmith, a retired British high
court judge, concluded that the uae“is
seeking to improperly influence Interpol
through funding and other mechanisms”.
Interpol has rejected such claims and pub
licly welcomed the donation.
But similar concerns are also coming
from inside the organisation. “Let us show
the world that Interpol is not for sale,” Ms
Havrankova told the group’s assembly on
the day of the presidential vote, in a thinly
veiled referencetotheuae’s lobbying ef
forts. Some mayhavealready reached a dif
ferent conclusion.n