Sin categoríaINTERPOL Red Diffusion: What It Is, Its Effects and How to Defend Yourself

Few situations generate as much uncertainty as discovering, usually at an airport passport control, that an international search alert is in force. INTERPOL red notices and diffusions are the most widely used instrument for locating persons in international police cooperation, and also one of the least understood. It is worth understanding exactly what they are, what consequences they have in Spain and what defence mechanisms exist, because the cases in which they are used abusively are not few.

Red notice and diffusion: they are not the same

The red notice is a formal alert that the INTERPOL General Secretariat publishes at the request of a member country in order to locate a person and request their provisional arrest for extradition purposes; it undergoes a prior compliance review before publication. The diffusion, by contrast, is a message that a national office sends directly to other countries through INTERPOL channels, without that prior filter: it circulates faster and with less control, which is why it is often the chosen route when the request is legally weak or presents spurious motivations.

What effects it produces in Spain

Neither the notice nor the red diffusion is, by itself, an international arrest warrant with direct effect: each State decides the legal value it attributes to them. In Spain they function in practice as a request for provisional arrest for extradition purposes. If the person is located, the police proceed to their arrest and bring them before the courts with central jurisdiction, which decide on their personal situation, with the possibility of pre-trial detention or release with precautionary measures such as passport withdrawal and periodic appearances, while the requesting State formalises the extradition request within the legal period. From there the passive extradition procedure regulated in Law 4/1985 and the applicable treaties opens, with its two phases, judicial and governmental. If the request is not formalised in time, the person must be released.

Important: the effects of a red alert go far beyond the arrest. It can mean denial of visas and residence permits, closure of bank accounts under the risk-prevention policies of financial institutions, loss of employment and severe reputational damage, even if the extradition is never granted.

Limits: articles 2 and 3 of the INTERPOL Constitution

INTERPOL cannot be used as a tool of political persecution. Article 3 of its Constitution strictly forbids any intervention in matters of a political, military, religious or racial character, and article 2 requires cooperation to be conducted in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On that basis, alerts directed against opponents, journalists, persecuted businesspeople or refugees must be cancelled. Precisely the condition of refugee or asylum seeker vis-a-vis the requesting State is, according to the organisation’s practice, a weighty ground for the deletion of the alert.

How to know whether an alert exists and how to challenge it

Only a part of red notices is published on the INTERPOL website; most of them, and all diffusions, are confidential. The route to know and fight the information is the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files, the CCF, an independent body seated in Lyon. Two types of applications can be filed before it: access requests, to know whether registered data exist, and correction or deletion requests, to remove the alert. The application is filed in writing, in one of the official languages, accompanied by identification and by all the documentation proving the violation: political motivation of the original proceedings, lack of procedural safeguards, refugee status or breach of the proportionality rules.

Defence strategy

A red alert requires working on two simultaneous levels. On the international level, preparing the application before the CCF as soon as possible, well documented, because a deleted alert deactivates the risk of arrest in third countries. On the domestic level, if the arrest has already taken place in Spain, fighting the extradition in the judicial procedure: pleading grounds for refusal, risk of inhuman treatment or unfair trial in the requesting State, covert political purposes, Spanish nationality or roots, and requesting provisional release while the file is processed.

Anticipating is essential: whoever knows they may be flagged by a State with a record of abusive use of INTERPOL does well to verify their situation and prepare their defence before undertaking an international trip.