Former INTERPOL Secretary General Diagnoses INTERPOL
Ronald K. Noble is the single most important individual in the history of modern INTERPOL. Serving as Secretary General from 2000 to 2014, both the duration and the significance of his service was unparalleled. He took office shortly before 9/11 and, after those attacks, played the central role in modernizing INTERPOL’s systems, which made it vastly easier for police forces around the world to use, resulting in a massive expansion of the number of INTERPOL alerts issued annually. To give one measure of this expansion, in 1998, Interpol published 737 Red Notices. In 2025, it published 19,568, an increase of over 26 times.
One of the unintended side effects of the modernization of INTERPOL that Noble championed was that, as its systems became easier use, they also became easier and more effective to abuse. During his tenure, Noble was reluctant to confront this issue. In 2013, he asserted that the idea that nations that abuse INTERPOL’s rules should not be allowed to use its channels was “one of the most dangerous proposals I have heard.” While allowing that INTERPOL was not “invulnerable to mistakes,” he boasted of its “strong safeguards.” The conclusion he drew from the saga of the Russian pursuit of William Browder was that “Interpol needs no major reforms.”
Many others did not share this confidence, and in the years after Noble’s departure, INTERPOL embarked on a raft of major reforms to its review and oversight mechanisms. Noble himself now accepts that INTERPOL does indeed reforms, for he recently published an op-ed in the Washington Times arguing that “ ‘Wanted by INTERPOL’ Has Lost Its Meaning.” Of course, 2026 is not 2013 – but it is still notable that Noble, formerly a redoubtable defender of INTERPOL, has joined the ranks of the concerned, if not the critics.
Noble calls for two major reforms. First, showing considerable knowledge of a case in which INTERPOL was used to pursue an alleged child abductor, he argues that INTERPOL should “sharply narrow the categories of cases eligible for Red Notices. Its 30,000 annual requests simply cannot receive adequate individualized review.” Second, citing an Australian case and Turkish claims – which few in the know will have taken seriously – that it would seek a Red Notice against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he argues that “member countries should prohibit the use of INTERPOL against another country’s political leaders when the targeted country objects that the matter is predominantly political.”
Noble’s first proposed reform raises several issues. He is almost certainly right that INTERPOL is at grave risk of being overrun by more requests than it can examine – if indeed it has not been overrun already. There are legitimate concerns surrounding the abuse of the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. Narrowing the kinds of cases eligible for a Red Notice would indeed reduce the number of requests INTERPOL has to review.
But it seems unlikely that refusing to publish Red Notices on custody disputes – a plausible reform – would resolve the problems created by the growth in Red Notice requests. Moreover, INTERPOL was created to deal with ordinary law crimes, and it again seems unlikely that INTERPOL’s member nations would want to narrow Red Notices sufficiently to substantially reduce the number of requests INTERPOL receives. Addressing the problems caused by the volume of Red Notice requests will likely involve either expanding the size of the staff on the Notices and Diffusions Task Force at INTERPOL that examines the requests, imposing clearer sanctions on nations that abuse the Red Notice system, or both.
Noble’s second reform stands on less solid ground. INTERPOL already has seven full pages of guidance on this issue, which – broadly – takes the position that a request by one country for a Red Notice on a current or former politician from another country has to meet an extremely high bar to have any chance of success, while a request by a country for a Red Notice on one of its own former politicians has at least a chance of being approved. While applying guidelines is harder than writing them, there is nothing in INTERPOL’s guidance that is obviously defective.
In the specific cases at hand, INTERPOL cannot stop Turkish politicians from talking, and this is not the first time that politicians have made claims about involving INTERPOL that were always going to amount to nothing. Noble asks INTERPOL to speak out publicly to reject the Turkish statements, but it would be unwise for INTERPOL to get into a shouting match with a foreign politician, and it is most unlikely that Noble himself would have done so when he was in office. As far as the Australian case is concerned, Australia is not the only country to have laws against bribing foreign politicians – the U.S. has the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – and in the case at hand, INTERPOL faced the insoluble problem of not knowing that an Australian court would later find the case defective when it published the Red Notice in question.
Noble argues that the allegation of bribing a foreign politician is inherently political, but – leaving aside the fact that many Red Notices involve allegations or implications of corruption by political figures – this case falls squarely, as Noble himself implies, under the INTERPOL doctrine of predominance, under which INTERPOL must assess whether a case is mostly a matter of normal law enforcement. There will always be disputes about how to apply this test, but in this case, there is no obvious reason to believe that Australian law enforcement was motivated by political animus. The old saying that hard cases – which this one surely was – make bad law comes to mind, and nothing in it appears to call for systemic reforms.
Noble concludes by stating that “When INTERPOL issues a flawed Red Notice, the damage can last for years.” That is entirely true. With his tremendous knowledge of modern INTERPOL, Noble has the opportunity both to enhance awareness of how INTERPOL works and the challenges it faces, and to suggest reforms that will improve the functioning of the organization that he played a major role in building.
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*Disclaimer: This information is presented for the purposes of general education and does not constitute legal advice.
