Beyond the Red Notice – Piers Desser reviews INTERPOL: Law and Practice (1st Edition) for the Law Society Gazette
INTERPOL is better known than it is understood. The phrase “Red Notice” suggests global arrest powers, but the legal reality is more nuanced, and that nuance matters a great deal to anyone affected by one.
Piers Desser has reviewed the first edition of INTERPOL: Law and Practice for the Law Society Gazette, awarding it five stars.
The difficulty is rarely a shortage of material. The relevant law is scattered across international instruments, domestic legislation, INTERPOL’s own rules, case law and the related fields of extradition, immigration, asylum and human rights. The book draws these strands into a single work written for practitioners. Piers highlights its explanation of the Notice System, including the key point that a Red Notice is neither an international arrest warrant nor a self-executing power of arrest. Its practical effect depends on the law of the country where the individual is found.
Particularly valuable, in his view, is the coverage of the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files (CCF). The practical questions are what information has been circulated, on what basis, whether it complies with the rules, and how it can be challenged. Placing CCF procedure alongside the wider Notice System makes those questions much easier to approach.
The authors also acknowledge that INTERPOL operates across very different legal systems and policing cultures, and that what looks straightforward in one jurisdiction can look quite different in another. Piers welcomes that candour, as well as the book’s attention to extradition, immigration and asylum. These are not merely neighbouring subjects: they can determine what actually happens to a person who becomes the subject of an international alert.
Piers concludes that the book fills a conspicuous gap for criminal, extradition, immigration and human rights practitioners. It takes a system that can seem opaque from the outside and makes its structure, procedures and remedies considerably clearer. His closing thought is that, whatever the cross-border dimension, the lawyer’s task remains a familiar one: understand the rules, identify the problem and work out what can be done about it.
Read the full review in the Law Society Gazette
