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A Red Notice is a request from one INTERPOL member country to police forces worldwide, asking them to locate a named person and arrest them pending extradition. It is not an international arrest warrant, but it can work like one: it can put a person at risk of arrest at any border, freeze their bank accounts, and cut off their ability to travel or work.
IHR Advisors, founded by UK international barristers Ben Keith and Rhys Davies, acts to remove Red Notices and the Diffusions that do the same job through a quieter channel, most often where the notice is political rather than genuine.
A notice can be challenged, and a wrongly issued one can be deleted.
Ben Keith and Rhys Davies are lawyers ranked for extradition and international work by Chambers and Partners and the Legal 500, co-authors of INTERPOL Law and Practice (Sweet & Maxwell, 2026), and the editors of Red Notice Monitor.
A Red Notice reaches into ordinary life long before any court has tested the charge behind it. A person can be arrested in a country they were only passing through, held pending an extradition hearing, and refused bail for as long as the proceedings run.
Bank accounts are frozen. Visa and residence applications are refused. Employment ends when an employer runs a background check. For many people, the first sign of a notice is an arrest at an airport, or a refusal at a border with no explanation given.
The request alone produces all of this, whether or not the allegation has any substance.
A Red Notice is removed by challenging its compliance with INTERPOL’s own rules, before the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files, known as the CCF.
The CCF is an independent body within INTERPOL that reviews complaints about the data INTERPOL holds. Its decisions bind INTERPOL, it charges no fee, and it decides on the written papers alone, without hearings.
A successful challenge rests on INTERPOL’s own rules. Article 3 of its Constitution forbids it from any involvement in matters of a political, military, religious or racial character, so a notice that serves a political purpose falls outside what INTERPOL is allowed to circulate.
Article 2 requires it to act in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so a notice tied to an unfair trial, a real risk of torture, or persecution can be challenged on that basis.
The CCF’s rules on data processing add further grounds, including notices based on private or commercial disputes.
There are five routes, and the right order depends on where the person stands.
An access request asks INTERPOL to confirm whether it holds data on a person and, where it can, to disclose it. The requesting country may be consulted first and can limit what is disclosed.
Under INTERPOL’s rules, the CCF has four months from the date a request is found admissible to decide it.
A deletion request asks the CCF to find that the notice or Diffusion breaks INTERPOL’s rules and to order it deleted.
The CCF gathers information from the applicant, the requesting country and INTERPOL’s General Secretariat, and issues a written, reasoned decision to both sides.
The rules give it nine months from admissibility. In practice decisions often take longer: INTERPOL’s own figures for 2024 show most access requests, and around a third of deletion requests, running past those deadlines.
Where the risk is immediate, such as a pending extradition or detention based on INTERPOL data, the CCF can order interim measures during its examination of the request, including restricting access to the data in the meantime.
For a person facing detention or extradition, this can matter as much as the final decision.
A person who expects a country to seek a notice can file a pre-emptive request setting out why any notice would break INTERPOL’s rules.
It is passed to INTERPOL’s General Secretariat, which can take it into account if a request arrives. It is not a decision, and it cannot guarantee a notice will be refused, but it puts the evidence in front of INTERPOL before a notice circulates rather than after an arrest.
A CCF decision can be revisited only where a new fact comes to light that would probably have changed the outcome of the original submission.
The application has to be made within six months of discovering that fact.
A refusal is not the end of the matter, but revision is narrow, so the first application needs to put all the relevant evidence and arguments before the CCF.
Since 26 March 2026 every request to the CCF goes through its online portal.
A deletion request is limited to a summary of arguments of no more than 10 pages and no more than 20 supporting documents, and must identify the INTERPOL rules said to be breached.
Documents must be in Arabic, English, French, or Spanish.
The CCF charges no fee, and a person can apply without a lawyer, but the case has to be won in a short, structured written submission, with no hearing to fill the gaps.
Being a real political target is not the same as proving it to INTERPOL. People often arrive certain their case is obviously political, as though the label alone settles the matter. It does not.
The CCF weighs whether the political elements outweigh the ordinary criminal character of the case, looking at the nature of the charge, the status of the person, the source of the information, the positions taken by other countries and international bodies, and the wider context.
The work of a Red Notice case is turning a true political case into a proven one, on the record.
Recognised refugees have additional protection. INTERPOL’s policy on refugees restricts notices against people granted refugee status where the request comes from the country they fled, and the CCF portal allows that status to be flagged at the outset.
A Diffusion is a request sent directly by one country’s National Central Bureau to the countries it chooses, rather than published to all member countries as a Red Notice.
INTERPOL records it in its databases, and it can lead to the same arrest at a border. Because it is sent country to country, a Diffusion can circulate quickly.
The same rules apply to both, and a Diffusion is challenged before the CCF in the same way.
| Who issues it | Who sees it | How it is challenged | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red Notice | A member country, published by INTERPOL’s General Secretariat | All INTERPOL member countries | Deletion request to the CCF |
| Diffusion | A member country’s National Central Bureau, directly | The countries the sender chooses | Deletion request to the CCF, on the same rules |
| National arrest warrant | A court in the requesting country | That country’s authorities | In the courts of the requesting country, through local counsel |
| European Arrest Warrant | A judicial authority in an EU member state | Other EU member states | In the courts of the country asked to surrender the person |
Deleting a notice clears INTERPOL’s channels. It does not cancel the warrant behind it in the requesting country, and it does not decide an extradition request already under way.
That is why the CCF work usually runs alongside extradition, asylum and human rights proceedings rather than on its own.
Red Notice work is a narrow field, and a general practice does not do enough of it to know how the CCF actually decides.
It turns on INTERPOL’s own rules and repository of practice, on how the Commission weighs evidence of political motivation, on the order in which access, interim measures and deletion are sought, and on the interaction between a notice, an extradition request and an asylum claim running at the same time.
Ben Keith and Rhys Davies have obtained the removal of politically motivated notices, act in the extradition and asylum proceedings that run alongside them, and co-founded Red Notice Monitor, where they publish analysis of INTERPOL cases and policy.
They co-wrote Undue Influence: The UAE and INTERPOL, the report that set out how political interference reached INTERPOL’s own leadership, and co-authored INTERPOL Law and Practice (Sweet & Maxwell, 2026).
Knowing how these cases are won, and in what order the steps are taken, is what experience decides.
Removal of a notice used as a weapon in commercial litigation. IHR Advisors acted for a high net worth individual caught up in multi-jurisdictional litigation, where a politically motivated Red Notice was being used by the other side.
By showing that the criminal allegations behind it had been manipulated by the client’s rivals, the firm secured the removal of the notice.
Ben Keith has spent years acting for people targeted by politically motivated Red Notices and extradition requests from states with little regard for the rule of law, taking those cases through INTERPOL’s own oversight body, the national courts and United Nations bodies, and acting in the asylum proceedings that often run alongside.
He is a lawyer at 5SAH in London, ranked for extradition and international work in both Chambers and Partners and the Legal 500, the former describing him as “out of this world”.
In 2021 he co-wrote Undue Influence: The UAE and INTERPOL with Rhys Davies and Sir David Calvert-Smith, setting out how political interference reached an international institution’s own leadership.
He has appeared on CBS 60 Minutes, written for the Financial Times, given evidence to the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights, and co-founded Red Notice Monitor, where he edits and publishes legal analysis of INTERPOL cases and policy.
Rhys Davies has built the same kind of practice from a different chair: cases involving INTERPOL Red Notices, extradition, torture and politically motivated prosecution across several jurisdictions, and communications to the United Nations where a case calls for them.
He is a lawyer at Temple Garden Chambers in London and The Hague, ranked as a leading individual by the Legal 500 2026, which calls him “a standout international lawyer” and the lawyer others turn to for UN submissions in difficult cases.
He has written on international law for The Economist, Newsweek, City A.M., the Guardian, The Times and the Independent, appears regularly on Al Jazeera, and has featured on CBS 60 Minutes and the Sky News Dirty Work podcast.
He co-founded and edits Red Notice Monitor, and in 2025 he gave evidence, alongside Ben Keith, to the Joint Committee on Human Rights.
Ben Keith and Rhys Davies founded IHR Advisors to keep the legal work, the strategy and the press handling of these cases in one place, because in practice they cannot be pulled apart.
A Red Notice is rarely dealt with by a single application, and the firm runs the whole of it: challenging the notice or Diffusion before the CCF, defending any extradition request behind it, carrying the asylum and human rights proceedings that move alongside, including applications to the European Court of Human Rights, managing publicity where it helps and holding it back where it would put the person at greater risk, and working with local counsel in every country where the person is at risk.
The people it acts for are individuals and their families, business people, politically exposed persons and human rights defenders. The notices come most often from states with a settled habit of transnational repression, the reaching of a government beyond its own borders to pursue the people it wants to silence.
It is a request from one INTERPOL member country to police worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest a person, pending extradition.
It is not an international arrest warrant, but it can lead to arrest at a border, frozen accounts and refused visas, whether or not the charge behind it has any substance.
By applying to the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files, the CCF, for deletion.
The application shows that the notice breaks INTERPOL’s own rules, most often that it serves a political purpose or is tied to an unfair process, and asks the CCF to order the data deleted.
Often, yes.
An access request to the CCF asks whether INTERPOL holds data on you and, where it can, discloses it. The requesting country is consulted and can limit what is disclosed.
Where a notice is only feared, a pre-emptive request can put the evidence before INTERPOL in advance.
INTERPOL’s rules give the CCF nine months from the date a deletion request is found admissible, and four months for an access request.
In practice decisions often take longer, and the time before a request is found admissible adds to that.
Where the risk is immediate, interim measures can be sought until the case is decided.
The CCF charges no fee.
The cost lies in preparing the application: a deletion request is limited to 10 pages of argument and 20 supporting documents, and there is no hearing, so the written case has to carry everything.
No, a person can apply to the CCF directly.
But the application is decided on the papers alone, within strict length limits, and usually has to be coordinated with extradition or asylum proceedings running at the same time.
Revision is only available on a new fact, so the first application needs to put all the relevant evidence and arguments before the CCF.
Yes.
Article 3 of INTERPOL’s Constitution forbids it from acting in matters of a political character. The CCF weighs whether the political elements outweigh the ordinary criminal character of the case, so the political purpose has to be proved on the evidence, set against the conduct of the requesting state and the pattern of its other cases.
A Red Notice is published by INTERPOL to all member countries. A Diffusion is sent directly by one country’s National Central Bureau to the countries it chooses.
Both can lead to arrest, both are governed by the same rules, and both can be challenged before the CCF.
INTERPOL’s policy on refugees restricts notices against people granted refugee status where the request comes from the country they fled.
Refugee or asylum status can be flagged when the application to the CCF is made.
The decision can be revisited only through an application for revision, based on a new fact that would probably have changed the outcome, made within six months of discovering it.
Other routes, such as extradition and human rights proceedings, remain open alongside.
Contact IHR Advisors through the contact page.
Ben Keith and Rhys Davies take instructions from individuals, family members, organisations and legal teams working in parallel, and early advice matters most where a person is at risk of arrest or travel is already affected.
If a Red Notice has been issued against you, or you have reason to think one is coming, take advice early rather than late.
These notices cross borders, they affect liberty and travel from the moment they circulate, and the choices made at the outset, which route to take first and what goes into a 10-page submission, are the hardest to undo.
A lawyer who works in this field can usually tell you, inside a single conversation, where you stand and what can be done about it.
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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