Turkish Announcement on the Return of Internationally Wanted Suspects Raises Questions About Abuse of INTERPOL
One of the central unknowns about the INTERPOL system is how often its member nations successfully use it to secure the return of wanted individuals from foreign countries.
INTERPOL does annually release the number of Red Notices, Wanted Person Diffusions, and other colored notices and diffusions published during the past year, and the number of all kinds of notices and diffusions that are currently valid. In 2025, for example, INTERPOL published 19,568 Red Notices, up by almost 26 percent from the 15,548 published in 2024.
This information shows that INTERPOL’s member nations are making steadily greater use of INTERPOL and must therefore be finding value in it. Notices and diffusions of different colors are published for different reasons and under different rules, and the kind of notices and diffusions available to INTERPOL member nations change over time, so comparisons across years are difficult. Adding up the annual notices published does nothing more than give us an indication of the overall level of activity in the INTERPOL system.
Still, is at least suggestive that in 2015, INTERPOL published a total of 18,632 notices, while in 2025 it published 27,525, an annual rate of increase of just under 5 percent. Diffusions have also increased, going from 22,600 in 2015 to 30,015 in 2025, an annual increase of roughly 3 percent.
These rates of increase are not steady, but the trend is consistent: each new year is likely, on average, to see greater use of the INTERPOL system than the one before it. This increase is one of the challenges facing INTERPOL: it means more network capacity, storage capacity, processing capacity, and personnel to screen requests are needed annually, none of these needs can be satisfied for free, and the necessary funds must ultimately come from INTERPOL’s member nations, which are evidently eager to use INTERPOL’s systems but not always as keen to pay for the oversight the system requires.
What cannot be deduced from the data is what use which nations are making of the INTERPOL system. It has long been thought that the U.S. is one of the most, if not the single most, intensive users of INTERPOL. But like most nations, the U.S. says little about this. One of the few nations that regularly announces its successes in bringing back individuals from overseas, including with the aid of INTERPOL, is Turkey, which recently stated that it has brought back 526 “internationally wanted suspects” in 2026 through July from 44 countries, including a bare minimum of 27 who were named in Red Notices. These individuals were wanted primarily for public order offenses, smuggling and organized crime, and narcotics-related crimes.
Unfortunately, Turkey has compiled a long and egregious track record of abuse in the INTERPOL system. In the data compiled by Freedom House, it ranks second in the amount of transnational repression committed since 2014. This abuse has tended to concentrate on accusations of terrorism against individuals purported to be supporters of exiled preacher Fethullah Gulen, whom the Turkish state accuses of being behind the 2016 coup attempt against President Erdogan. But as INTERPOL has grown more wary of such accusations, Turkey has avowedly sought to find other allegations that can survive INTERPOL’s review process.
This is where the 225 individuals accused by Turkey of public order offenses come in. “Public order offenses” in Turkey cover a wide variety of behaviors, including many that would be recognized as political (or not criminal at all) in other countries, such as publicly praising “an offence or a person on account of an offence he has committed” or sharing purported “disinformation,” for which it has been severely criticized by the European Commission for Democracy through Law of the Council of Europe. The obvious concern is that Turkey is weaponizing accusations of “public order offenses” to secure the return of individuals – including but not only through INTERPOL mechanisms – that it wants for political reasons.
It is disconcerting that Turkey is one of the few INTERPOL member nations that openly boasts about its use of the INTERPOL system, and that the single largest category of purported offenses asserted by Turkey is so obviously open to political manipulation and abuse. There is no doubt that the spotlight on previous Turkish abuses has reduced its reliance on spurious charges of terrorism. But both Turkey’s extradition partners and INTERPOL itself must be aware that changes of charge do not mean that Turkey has clearly changed its strategy of abusing international extradition mechanisms.
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*Disclaimer: This information is presented for the purposes of general education and does not constitute legal advice.
