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Interpol open to abuse by ‘criminal states’

EU Observer

When Petr Silaev, a Russian journalist, got political asylum in Finland in April 2012 after escaping a crackdown in his home country, he felt safe and began a new life.

But in August the same year, he found himself handcuffed and shoved face-down on the floor of a police car on a seven-hour trip from Granada, Spain, where he went on holiday, to a detention centre in Madrid, where he risked extradition.

“The Spanish police treated me in a mind-breaking way … They kept saying: ‘You’ll be deported.’ They kept abusing me, saying: ‘You’re a Russian terrorist’,” he told EUobserver.

When Ales Mihalevic, an opposition candidate in Belarus’ presidential elections in 2010, fled his home country, he found himself, in July 2011, detained by Polish airport police and risking a similar fate.

The link in both cases was Interpol, the international police body based in Lyon, France.

Belarus and Russia had filed requests for their capture using Interpol systems and two of Interpol’s 190 fellow member states, Spain and Poland, took action.

Mihalevic and Silaev are not freak examples.

In January last year, Eerik Kross, an Estonian politician and a former director of Estonia’s intelligence service, also became a wanted man after Interpol issued a “red notice” on Moscow’s say-so.

Kross is a known adversary of the Kremlin.

He was a leading proponent of Estonia’s Nato membership. In the 2008 Georgia-Russia war, he helped Georgia to fight off Russian cyber attacks.

But Russia used the long arm of Interpol to reach out for him on different grounds.

It filed the notice saying Kross masterminded the hijack of a Russian ship, the Arctic Sea, off the coast of Sweden in 2009, a claim which Kross calls “idiotic.” It did so on grounds that a witness in an Arctic Sea trial had mentioned his name.