Interpol May Need to Be Investigated
The agency is broken, and if it can’t be fixed it should be replaced.
Legitimacy at risk.
Photographer: Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty Images
The global law-enforcement agency Interpol has in recent years become almost a mockery of itself, serving as a tool for the most repressive governments on earth to persecute dissidents, human-rights activists and journalists. Now things may get worse: On Wednesday, member states are likely to elect a new president from one of the worst malefactors, Russia.
The problem is that Russia — along with other authoritarian nations, including China, Iran, Venezuela and Turkey — abuses the system by issuing “red notices” to other member states requesting them to arrest people on spurious grounds and extradite them to their home nations.