Dismantling the Tools ofreport Oppression INTERPOL 2018 FATF Recommendation 8 Recommendation 8 was adopted by the FATF, the intergovernmental body set up to tackle international money-laundering, not long after the ‘9/11’ terror attacks, out of concerns that non-profit organisations were particularly vulnerable to abuse by terrorist organisations. It called on countries to ensure that non-profit organisations were not being used conceal financial transactions relating to terrorist activities. Although Recommendation 8 was intended to protect non-profit organisations, its broad wording resulted in several countries adopting laws that severely restricted the funding of legitimate civil society organisations, and compromised their activities. In 2016, Recommendation 8 was amended further to the efforts of various non-profit organisations to make sure that any laws regulating non-profit organisations are “focused and proportionate”.143 155. However, there is also a risk that, as a result of INTERPOL’s recent reforms, and the strengthening of its protections against the misuse of its systems, countries might begin to use alternative mechanisms without similar protections to track, harass, and undermine political dissidents, human rights defenders, and others. International criminal justice cooperation should take place within a rules-based framework, such as the kind provided by INTERPOL, and INTERPOL should be alert to the risk that its own ability to ensure that international police cooperation takes place effectively could be undermined, if countries use alternative mechanisms. There are signs that this is already starting to happen, and one example of this is Turkey’s increasing use of its ‘terrorist search’ (‘Teror Arananlar’) website. 154. It is unlikely that INTERPOL and FATF are isolated examples of the misuse of international mechanisms. Indeed, alongside the shrinking space for civil society there is growing global pressure for countries to co-operate to fight crime and to increase technological capacity to exchange growing quantities of data for this purpose. Use of sanctions, so-called ‘terror lists’ and pre-emptive security measures all carry the risk of abuse by states seeking to silence legitimate human rights activism and are likely to become an issue of growing concern in the coming years. Having made such positive steps to ensure that it is not facilitating cooperation at the expense of fundamental human rights, the change achieved already by INTERPOL serves as an example of good practice for other cooperation mechanisms. Iva Dobichina, ‘The Big Impact of the Little-Known “Recommendation 8”’, Open Society Foundations (11 July 2016) Available at: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/big-impact-little-known-recommendation-8 143 67