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INTERPOL maintains a register of travel documents which member states have reported stolen, lost, revoked or otherwise invalid, known as the Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database, or SLTD. It is queried constantly, by border officers and by airline check-in systems. Only the issuing state may make an entry, but an entry takes effect the moment it is made, without notice to the holder of the document, without any review of the decision to make it, and with no way of objecting in advance.
The database was built to catch people travelling on other people’s passports, and for that purpose it works well enough. The difficulty arises where the issuing state is the state a person has left. Cancelling his passport then becomes a means of getting him back, and it operates in airports and border control points rather than in courtrooms. It is an area of our INTERPOL practice that rarely reaches the headlines.
A client of ours discovered this at an airport in the Balkans. A Turkish national, he had lived in the United Kingdom for years on a business visa, together with his family. Turkey says all of them are Gülenists, associated with the movement the Turkish government has pursued since the attempted coup of 2016 and treats as a terrorist organisation. Turkey cancelled his passport on that basis and reported the cancellation to INTERPOL. He learned of it only when he handed the passport across a check-in desk and was taken to one side.
What happens after that is regulated by rules of carriage rather than by any court. An airline presented with an invalid travel document will ordinarily return the passenger to his state of nationality. Here that meant a flight to Istanbul, and it meant that a man against whom Turkey had made no extradition request would arrive in Turkish custody without a hearing having taken place anywhere. Extradition proceedings exist precisely to decide whether a person should be sent to a particular state and what is likely to happen to him when he arrives there. The SLTD route reaches the same destination without either question being asked.
He sat in the airport for nine hours while we argued with the airline by telephone, making the same narrow point repeatedly: he had boarded in the United Kingdom, where he was lawfully resident, so the country of return ought to be the country the journey began in rather than the country which had cancelled the document. The airline accepted it and flew him to London.
That dealt with the day itself but not with the entry, which remained live. While it remained live he could not travel at all.
We then challenged it, assembling the evidence of his residence and status in the United Kingdom and setting out the political background against which the passport had been cancelled. The case we put was that the entry was being used for a purpose the database does not exist to serve. It was removed, and the cancellation no longer follows him through INTERPOL’s systems.
Turkey is not the only government to have understood what a cancellation can do. The SLTD attracts a small fraction of the attention paid to Red Notices while reaching a great many more people. That is one reason Rhys Davies and Ben Keith deal with it at length in INTERPOL: Law and Practice (Sweet & Maxwell), published on 23 September 2026.
A Red Notice at least invites a challenge before the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files. A cancelled passport simply removes a person from the departure lounge.
If your passport has been cancelled by a state you have left, we can advise on both halves of the problem: the airline at the desk, and the entry sitting behind it. We act on SLTD entries, Red Notices and Diffusions, and the wider questions of transnational repression and international law that so often sit behind them.
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If you would like to speak with us about our areas of practice or anything else please contact us via the form linked below.
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