Dismantling the Tools ofreport Oppression INTERPOL 2018 Red Notices 15. The Red Notice is an electronic alert published by INTERPOL at the request of one of the NCBs or other entities. Its function is to ‘seek the location of a wanted person and their detention, arrest or restriction of movement with the view to extradition, surrender or similar lawful action’.5 Its purpose is therefore to help one country locate a wanted person in order to have them extradited from the country in which s/he is encountered. 16. Each Red Notice is based on a national arrest warrant issued by the competent authorities of the requesting state. The NCB supplies a summary of the facts which form the basis for the allegation and specifies the offence charged, the relevant laws creating that offence and the maximum sentence, or the actual sentence imposed if the person has already been convicted. The request must also include identifiers for the person: their name, photograph, nationality and other items, including biometric data such as fingerprints and DNA profiles.6 If the General Secretariat finds the Red Notice request compliant with the rules, the Red Notice will be published in its databases and circulated to all other NCBs. 17. A Red Notice is not an international arrest warrant. Each country decides what action to take based on a Red Notice. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, do not consider the Red Notice to be a valid legal basis for provisional arrest, but many others do. A document produced by the United States NCB states that ‘for approximately one-third of the member countries a Red Notice serves as a provisional arrest warrant’,7 but that the US itself, like the United Kingdom, does not treat it as such.8 However, even in countries which do not regard Red Notices as a sufficient basis for arrest, officers at border points may have powers to hold a person under administrative immigration detention powers,9 during which time the requesting country can be notified of an arrest and a formal request made for a provisional arrest warrant. 18. In 2009, INTERPOL launched ‘i-link’, a system which made it easier for NCBs to upload requests for Red Notices by enabling them to record the content of Red Notices directly on to INTERPOL’s databases. As explained in more detail below, the procedures for uploading Red Notices have changed since then and they are not visible to NCBs until they have been reviewed by the General Secretariat. The introduction of the i-link coincided with a sharp increase in Red Notices issued: from 3,126 in 2008, the figure jumped to 5,020 in 2009. Since then, the number of new Red Notices has continued to rise. In 2016, almost 13,000 new Red Notices were issued.10 Diffusions 19. Since the early 2000s, NCBs have also had the option of circulating ‘Diffusions’: electronic alerts which, like a Red Notice, can be used to request the arrest of a wanted person. The difference is that these are not formal ‘notices’ published by the General Secretariat.11 20. Diffusions are circulated to other NCBs, and at the same time recorded on INTERPOL’s databases. An NCB can use a Diffusion to limit circulation of the information to individual NCBs, groups of NCBs, or all NCBs. Diffusions can be issued to seek a person’s arrest where the specific conditions for a Red Notice (e.g. the minimum sentence threshold) are not met. Diffusions thus seem to be designed as a more informal cooperation request, of lower authority and injunctive value than a Red Notice and, in practice, they appear to function like e-mails circulated by NCBs through INTERPOL’s systems. RPD, Article 82 RPD, Article 83 7 Chatham House meeting summary, p. 4. 8 US National Central Bureau of INTERPOL, Audit Report 09-35, September 2009, p. 11 9 See, for example, in respect of the United Kingdom, Immigration Act 1971, Schedule 2, paragraph 16 5 6 11