On Sunday, delegates of the general assembly of Interpol — the International Criminal Police Organization, the coordinating body for law enforcement from 192 countries — met in Dubai for their 87th annual session. The most important agenda item will come on the final day: on Wednesday, delegates will elect the organization’s new president to replace Meng Hongwei, who went missing in China in October. (The Chinese authorities later announced that Meng had been arrested on “corruption charges,” and sent what was purported to be his resignation letter to the agency’s headquarters in Lyon, France.)
The leading candidate to become the next president of Interpol is Alexander Prokopchuk, a police general in the Russian Interior Ministry who has for the past seven years headed Interpol’s Russian bureau. Prokopchuk’s candidacy was kept under wraps until the last moment — and, presumably, until the Kremlin was confident of securing enough votes. The British government has determined that Prokopchuk’s victory is assured to the extent that “there is no point in trying to stop him.” A British human rights group, Fair Trials, wrote to the Interpol secretariat strongly protesting the nomination and noting that “it would not be appropriate for a country with a record of violations of Interpol’s rules (for example by frequently seeking to use its systems to disseminate politically motivated alerts) to be given a leadership role in a key oversight institution.”
“Politically motivated alerts” have been a favorite Kremlin tactic, used to legitimize its prosecution of political opponents and make their lives more difficult by limiting their movements. Despite the explicit ban in https://www.interpol.int/About-INTERPOL/Legal-materials/The-Constitution on “any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character,” the organization happily accepted Moscow’s requests to issue “red notices” — in effect, international arrest warrants — against prominent Kremlin opponents.
