The Zero-Cost Weapon

Authoritarian regimes across Central Asia have found an unusually cheap way to pursue their critics abroad. Filing a Red Notice with Interpol costs a state nothing. There are no fees, no consequences if the notice is later deleted, and no accountability for the officials who sign off on it. For a dissident sitting in Warsaw or Vienna, the effects can be devastating.

That asymmetry was at the heart of a recent LinkedIn Live in which we were joined by Leila Seiitbek, founder of Freedom for Eurasia. Seiitbek knows the terrain from both sides. She has helped citizens recover funds diverted from housing programmes in Kyrgyzstan—work that made her a target of state repression. She now lives in exile in Austria, where she continues to document political persecution across the post-Soviet space.

Article 3 of Interpol’s constitution expressly prohibits use of the system for political, military, religious, or racial purposes. The problem, as Seiitbek and we discussed, is that the prohibition is being routinely circumvented. The template is familiar: fraud, embezzlement, tax evasion, or—increasingly—extremism and terrorism. These charges are easy to fabricate and hard to disprove. Tajikistan alone has close to 4,000 Red Notices standing as of 2024, yet faces no additional scrutiny when it submits a new request.

Interpol’s vulnerability is structural. The organisation must trust its member states. With limited resources and case officers who may not know the political context of a particular country, it is ill-equipped to separate genuine criminal requests from politically motivated ones. A terrorism allegation against a Tajik dissident is almost impossible to verify from Lyon.

The human cost is severe. For those caught in the system, a notice can mean frozen bank accounts, detention at borders, and an inability to travel freely even within Europe—sometimes for years. Seiitbek described a case in which a person granted asylum in Spain was denied entry to Germany, the shadow of fabricated extremist charges lingering long after the notice itself had been challenged. For those deported back to requesting states, prison terms of 20 or 25 years are common. Torture, as we noted, is routine in several of these jurisdictions.

European governments are not innocent bystanders. Several have deported individuals on the basis of Red Notices while declining to engage with civil society organisations raising concerns. In one case, German authorities escorted deportees to Dushanbe and handed over their mobile devices—which were then seized by Tajik intelligence services, compromising the contacts, messages, and networks of everyone in them.

What can be done? The Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files can delete notices on political or human rights grounds—but the process is slow. A case we submitted in January 2024 had still received no response over a year later. Seiitbek called for Interpol to engage directly with civil society organisations that understand the regional context. Neither of us holds much hope that meaningful change is imminent.

The system, as currently designed, offers authoritarian states an almost frictionless tool for transnational repression. Until Interpol imposes serious scrutiny on serial abusers—and member states stop treating extremism charges at face value—that will not change.

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