Interpol accused of using 'wanted' alerts to bersmirch exiled opponent
Interpol has been accused of allowing dictatorships to use its system of international 'wanted' alerts to persecute and besmirch political opponents who have fled abroad
12:01AM GMT 27 Nov 2013
Countries with dubious human rights records such as Belarus, Iran and Sri Lanka have all used the “red notice” system to demand arrests in politically motivated cases.
The requests have led to dissidents and activists being arrested and spending time in prison while they fight extradition requests, sometimes within the European Union, according to a human rights group.
Fair Trials International, which has compiled a dossier of “abuses” of the system, said that many highly contentious requests appeared to be simply rubber-stamped with little consideration of the political context.
“There seems to be a failure sometimes to proactively gather information about the human rights situation surrounding a case,” said Robert Jackman, a spokesman for Fair Trials.
“We have seen cases where countries seem to be doing this simply to undermine the reputation of the person concerned, by saying that they are wanted for a serious crime.”Founded in 1923 to allow different European states to share information on crime, Interpol now covers some 190 countries and has an annual budget of £59 million. The number of red notices it issues has gone up steeply in the past decade, from 1,277 in 2002 to 8,136 last year, raising questions about how closely each request is vetted.
Among the cases highlighted in the report was that of Dmitrij Radkovich, a financier of opposition parties in the ex-Soviet state of Belarus, whose leader, Alexander Lukashenko, is known as “Europe’s last dictator”.
Mr Radkovich, who fled his homeland in 2009 and was granted asylum by the EU, was arrested in Bulgaria last year on the basis of a warrant issued to Interpol by the Belarussian authorities, which accused him of financial misconduct.
He then spent two months under curfew before a Bulgarian court threw out the case on the grounds that it was politically motivated. Fair Trials said Interpol had been able to give it no explanation as to why the warrant was circulated in the first place, nor could it explain why it had not been lifted after Mr Radkovich had previously been detained on it in Italy six months before. Fair trials suspects that often the notices simply linger in police databases once they are inputted, leaving their subjects facing the risk of arrest for years to come.
One such case was a Briton, Lorraine Davies, who had a Red Notice in place against for more than 20 years from the Canadian authorities. The father of her two children had pressed charges against her after she took her children back to Wales during a custody battle.
Fair trails also claimed to have found cases where countries appeared to have issued Red Notices simply as “public relations” exercises, in the hope that having it circulated by Interpol would help dignify political smears.
One such case was Chandima Withana, a Sri Lankan lawyer and journalist granted citizenship by Britain, who was accused of forgery. Another was Benny Wenda, the British-based leader-in-exile of the movement for the independence of West Papua, a province of Indonesia. A Red Notice was in place for 18 months, featuring a photograph taken from his campaign website and “associating his work with criminality”, Fair Trials said.
Another case involved Red Notices being obtained by Iran against 12 activists exiled in Sweden, who had been refugees there for more than 20 years.
The report also mentioned an unnamed British air hostess who was the subject of a Red Notice after a cheque she wrote for a car in a Middle Eastern country bounced. As a result, she was unable to carry on working as cabin crew on transatlantic flights.
Responding to the report, Interpol said it acknowledged that there was a risk of warrants being used for “political or other inappropriate reasons” and that its scrutiny procedures were being tightened. However, it said that a Fair Trials recommendation to apply the same level of scrutiny to arrest warrants as an extradition court would not be “practical”.
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