Interpol Inappropriate use of Red Notices is the organisations Achilles heel Chris Bryant
Interpol Inappropriate use of Red Notices is the organisations Achilles heel Chris Bryant
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00:00 But can I say, first of all, well done to Sky for doing this.
00:03 We on the Foreign Affairs Committee have been trying to raise issues around the problems
00:06 with red notices being served by countries, in particular authoritarian regimes, China,
00:13 Russia, Qatar and others, as a way of repressing internal dissent in their own country or criticism
00:19 of their country since 2021 when we produced a report which laid out all these problems.
00:25 But it's really good that I think you're the first broadcaster that has really taken this
00:29 seriously.
00:30 So thank you very much to Sky.
00:32 It's great that the UK government is very slowly showing an interest in this.
00:39 But I remember very clearly, I'd just gone to Madrid.
00:42 I'm chair of the All Party Spain group and I'd gone to Madrid and I had meetings with
00:46 the then leader of the opposition, Pedro Sanchez.
00:51 And that morning, Bill Browder rang me to say that he'd been arrested in Spain on a
00:56 red notice through Interpol, which had been issued by Russia.
01:00 Now, Bill Browder has been a prominent critic of the Putin regime for a long time.
01:06 And fortunately, I was able to get in touch with Pedro Sanchez, who that day became prime
01:10 minister and we were able to get Bill Browder released.
01:14 But that kind of abuse of the system simply shouldn't happen.
01:18 Interpol is a great organization.
01:21 And you know, the general secretary is quite right that in the main, it manages to track
01:26 down criminals across the world in 195 different countries.
01:30 And it does a brilliant job.
01:31 But it has got this Achilles heel, which is the inappropriate use of red notices.
01:38 And I worry that the direction of travel that we're going in, if we continue to see the
01:43 complacency from Mr. Stok, that we saw in your series, the danger is that people will
01:49 lose confidence in Interpol completely.
01:52 So do you think there should be a review, an international review of how these red notices
01:56 are used?
01:57 There needs to be a review of how they're used and of how Interpol is funded.
02:03 There was a very large amount of money given to Interpol by the United Arab Emirates a
02:06 few years ago.
02:08 We need to see how that influences decisions that are taken by Interpol.
02:14 Look, as you know, with any kind of international cooperation, it's all very well for us to
02:23 think, well, if we issued an Interpol red notice, of course, that would have gone through
02:27 due process and there'd be a fair hearing and the police would not be operating and
02:34 the prosecuting authorities would not be operating in a malicious way.
02:38 But we don't have that guarantee in some other countries around the world where human rights
02:42 are not defended.
02:44 And of course, the charter that sort of establishes Interpol means that they are meant to respect
02:49 all the elements of the International Convention on Human Rights.
02:53 And my anxiety is that quite often, as I say, countries like China, Qatar, Russia in particular,
03:02 use red notices as a means of shutting up dissent in their own country.
03:07 I mean, who are Interpol?
03:08 I mean, they're sort of seen by many as an international police force, but they aren't
03:12 really that, are they?
03:15 No, I think it stands for the, oh, you're going to prove my idiocy now, the International
03:24 Police, Cooperation, Policing Organisation, something like that.
03:30 Sorry, you've thrown me there.
03:32 People can Google what it stands for, but I was more trying to get at who are the people
03:36 who are enforcing these notices.
03:38 It's an elected organisation.
03:41 The leadership is elected through the usual international processes.
03:46 And that's why we wrote our document in 2021, because we were anxious about who is being
03:51 proposed to be the new general secretary and who is going to be in charge of the organisation.
03:57 There were proposals at one point that it was going to be led by a Chinese representative,
04:01 and we were very anxious about that because we thought that that would be taking the organisation,
04:06 which is meant to be based on the principles of fairness and the rule of law, down a direction
04:15 which would probably embrace more Chinese understandings of justice and the rule of
04:20 law, which would be very different from our own.
04:22 So if Interpol does need policing, in a sense, who reforms, who polices them?
04:29 Well, all the 195 members need to look carefully at the structures of the organisation.
04:39 I think we, the British government, need to lean much more heavily on the general secretary
04:44 to look at these specific issues.
04:47 It's not good enough to say I'm not going to look at specific instances because it's
04:51 the specific instances that prove the problem with the way the system's working.
04:58 And then, of course, the United Nations has a significant role to play in ensuring that
05:03 Interpol operates in a way that upholds the United Nations Convention on Human Rights.
05:11 OK, Chris Bryant, good to talk to you on this.
05:13 Thanks very much.