Opinion

Pointless Interpol wrangling

November 22, 2018

There is something distinctly odd about the row that has broken out over the appointment of a new head of Interpol, the international clearing agency for police intelligence and arrest warrants.

A South Korean, Kim Jong-yang, has just been chosen by a majority of Interpol’s 194 member states meeting in Dubai for their annual conference. The Russians have called “foul”, insisting that their candidate, Alexander Prokopchuk, who had initially appeared to be the favorite, was undermined by a concerted US-led lobbying effort to block his election.

And, indeed, there were Western claims that Prokopchuk, a retired general and senior member of the Russian interior ministry, had abused Interpol’s international arrest warrant system to try and detain overseas critics of Kremlin policies. One such dissident was Bill Browder, an American-born British financier who had run a major investment fund in Moscow. He fell out with the Putin government after the 2009 death in prison of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Moscow has twice tried through Interpol to arrest Browder and have him extradited to Russia, most recently in Spain a year ago on an Interpol warrant issued by Prokopchuk. Held by Spanish police for two hours, he was released after the case was deemed to be political.

The argument against Prokopchuk’s leadership of Interpol included the fact that he would have access to the organization’s entire database. Yet, interestingly, the Russian is currently and will remain one of Interpol’s four vice-presidents and until now there has been absolutely no protest at his holding this role.

Moreover, the man Interpol members were having to replace as president was China’s Meng Hongwei who disappeared in September when he flew into Beijing. The Chinese government has since said that he is being held on suspicion of corruption. It must be wondered why those countries that went out of their way to scupper Prokopchuk’s candidacy felt comfortable with having Interpol led by someone from China, where dissidents are no more tolerated than in Putin’s Russia, though in China they tend not to be gunned down in the street nor die in prison.

Interpol makes the point that its day-to-day operations are actually run by its secretary-general Jurgen Stock who was elected to the post for five years in November 2014. The president and deputies have largely ceremonial roles. Yet such a claim is surely disingenuous. Prokopchuk, who ran Interpol’s Moscow office, clearly knows the organization every bit as well as the arrested Meng Hongwei and even now is in a position to influence or gather intelligence on its operations. This could be important for instance in the case of those Russian spies who are accused of murdering dissidents in the UK and elsewhere.

Nevertheless, this row is largely specious. And nothing must be allowed to undermine the important role that Interpol, set up almost a century ago, now plays. Of particular concern to all its 194 members, with a few exceptions, such as Iran, is the long and complex fight against terrorism. As a clearinghouse for intelligence and with established mechanisms to identify and bring about the detention of terrorist suspects, the work that Interpol does from its base in Lyon, France, is of the highest importance. Whatever the disputes about its leadership, Interpol should be allowed to get on with this crucial tasking


November 22, 2018
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