The Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files (CCF) has published seven decision excerpts for 2026. Five of the 2026 CCF decisions end in deletion; one keeps a Red Notice subject to an update of the file, and one maintains a Diffusion. All seven are in our CCF Decisions Database, each with a summary and the full published text.
Four of the decisions concern the description of the wanted person’s acts (2026-01, 04, 05 and 07), and three concern refused extraditions (2026-02, 05 and 06). Decision 2026-05 falls under both, and 2026-03 concerns the torture of co-defendants.
Most follow earlier decisions, and two go further. In 2026-05, the Commission explained why a notice or Diffusion must describe what the person is accused of doing. The description allows other member countries to check whether they can cooperate: for instance, whether the conduct is also an offense under their own law, whether it is time-barred there, or whether their cooperation treaties exclude it. In 2026-03, a finding that co-defendants had been tortured, made by a regional human rights court in their own case, led to the deletion of the applicant’s Red Notice.
The 2026 CCF decisions at a glance
| Decision | Data | Outcome | Main point |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-01 | Diffusion | Maintained | The person’s role was described clearly enough, and he did not show that the requesting State knew where he was |
| 2026-02 | Red Notice | Deleted | Conviction in absentia with doubts over notification, and extradition refused on human rights grounds (Article 2) |
| 2026-03 | Red Notice | Deleted | Torture of co-defendants found by a regional human rights court (Article 2) |
| 2026-04 | Red Notice request | Deleted | The scheme was never described, a single transfer was the only link, and the arrest warrant was not produced |
| 2026-05 | Diffusion | Deleted | No clear description of the person’s acts, with a refusal of extradition as additional evidence |
| 2026-06 | Red Notice | Kept, refusal to be recorded | Extradition refused as time-barred, which does not prevent cooperation elsewhere |
| 2026-07 | Red Notice | Deleted | The company head was only said to have instructed his staff, and the NCB’s answer repeated the notice |
Describing what the person did
Article 83(2)(b)(i) of INTERPOL’s Rules on the Processing of Data (RPD) requires a Red Notice to include a summary of facts giving “a succinct and clear description of the criminal activities of the wanted person, including the time and location of the alleged criminal activity”. Three decisions turn on that requirement, or on its equivalent for Diffusions: in two the data were deleted, and in the third they were kept.
In Decision 2026-07, the summary of facts described large-scale smuggling of frozen goods by the employees of the applicant’s company, with coherent figures on the goods and the profit from evading customs (para. 25). About the applicant himself, it said only that he organized and directed his employees and instructed them to smuggle, with no detail of who was told to do what.
“Short of an individualized or precise description, the mere assertion that he instructed the commission of the crime is alone insufficient to constitute concrete information linking him to the activity in question.”
CCF, Decision 2026-07, para. 27
Access to the data had been blocked during the study because of “the lack of appropriate answers from the NCB” (para. 4). Asked again about the applicant’s role, the National Central Bureau (NCB) sent an answer that “merely mirrors the basic information already available in the Red Notice” (para. 28).
It also referred to a final judgment, but the judgment it produced concerned only co-defendants, and it never said whether the applicant had been tried in his own proceedings. The Commission could not tell whether he was still wanted for prosecution, as the notice said, or to serve a sentence, and so could not ensure compliance with Article 12 on the quality of data (paras. 21 to 23). The data were deleted.
Decision 2026-04 concerned a Red Notice request for money laundering. The summary of facts said the applicant had promoted a pyramid scheme banned by the central bank, but the scheme itself was never described (paras. 21 and 22), and a single transfer from one of the company’s directors was all that linked him to it (para. 23).
He said he was a practicing lawyer, and that the payments he received from co-defendants who were his clients covered legal services and the rent of his property, for which he produced a lease (paras. 12 and 13). The NCB did not reply to the Commission’s repeated reminders on that explanation (para. 18). It also did not provide the arrest warrant, which on its own prevented the Commission from ensuring compliance with Article 12 (para. 20). The Commission expressed “concern” that the facts did not amount to a clear description of criminal involvement under Article 83(2)(b)(i), and the data were deleted (para. 24).
The Diffusion for abuse of authority in Decision 2026-01 was found clear enough. It gave the date, manner and place of the conduct, the applicant’s seat on the board, his part in proposing the deputy director who signed the contract, and a sale price three times below market value, and a document from the investigator corroborated these facts (paras. 22 and 23). The Commission found “a clear description of the Applicant’s role” (para. 24), rejected the argument that the case was a corporate dispute on the same facts (paras. 28 to 31), and kept the data.
Earlier case law
None of this departs from earlier decisions. Already in the first excerpts the CCF published, in 2017, the Commission asked whether the NCB shows the person’s “possible effective personal participation” (2017-08, para. 26), and in 2023 it said that the information “must clearly identify the role of the Applicant, his specific criminal actions, the time and the means to commit the infraction” (2023-05, para. 27).
An assertion that the person gave instructions, without saying which, had already counted against the data in 2018 (2018-08, para. 39), and so had an NCB’s failure to answer the Commission’s questions on the person’s role (2024-02, para. 32). The 2026 decisions refer more specifically to the General Secretariat’s standards, including its guidance of 25 August 2023 on summaries of facts (2026-05, para. 19).
The same requirement for Diffusions
In Decision 2026-05, the Commission said that Article 83 does not apply “stricto sensu” to Diffusions. It then held, “in view of the similarity of purposes” between Red Notices and wanted person Diffusions, that the quality requirements of Articles 12 and 99(2) RPD, with the relevance and interest requirements of Articles 35 and 37(h), “imply the need for a clear and coherent description of the alleged criminal activities attributed to the wanted individual for the circulation of a Diffusion” (para. 18).
The Diffusion listed charges running from abuse of a public official’s status to money laundering and fraud, all tied to customs transit declarations. The Commission could not tell whether the applicant was accused of making the allegedly fraudulent declarations himself or of benefiting from them as the company’s agent, and it was “unable to clearly understand the acts constituting the actus reus of the distinct charges” (para. 20).
“[T]he requirement enshrined in the RPD to provide a clear description of the criminal activities linking the data subject to the charges is not purely formal, but is notably aimed at allowing other member countries to verify their ability [to] cooperate on the basis of the data, for instance through the application of the dual criminality principle, of the statute of limitation, or of exception clauses excluding some type of criminality from cooperation treaties.”
CCF, Decision 2026-05, para. 21
We expect this paragraph to be cited often. A requested country may not be able to check dual criminality or its own limitation period against facts it cannot understand, and we have not found an earlier published excerpt that ties the description requirement to that reason.
Earlier case law
The requirement itself is not new. The Commission was already reviewing the description in Diffusions in the 2017 excerpts (2017-13, paras. 27 and 28). It deleted two Diffusions on that ground in 2023 (2023-01, paras. 39 and 40; 2023-03, paras. 30 to 32), and applied the same test in 2026-01 (para. 20).
Refused extraditions and trials in absentia
Three decisions deal with refused extraditions, and the weight given to each refusal appears to depend on the reasons for it.
In Decision 2026-02, the applicant had been arrested abroad, and a court there refused extradition over real risks of an unfair trial and of detention in conditions not compliant with international standards (para. 24). While those proceedings were under way, he was convicted in absentia in the requesting State, without counsel, as a fugitive “untraceable” abroad, although the judicial documents recorded that he lived in a third country and owned a company there with publicly accessible contact details. The NCB never showed what had been done to notify him, and no appeal remained open (paras. 18 to 21). The Commission found the data not compliant with Article 2 of INTERPOL’s Constitution, and they were deleted (para. 25).
In Decision 2026-05, the Commission quoted the decision of the appeal court in the requested country, which had found the requesting State’s documents “extremely confusing”. It treated the refusal as “additional evidence” that the criminal acts were not clearly described (para. 25), and relied as well on its own earlier decision finding a co-defendant’s “virtually identical Diffusion” not compliant (para. 26). The requested State’s NCB never answered the Commission’s questions on the refusal, but the Commission accepted the decision as authentic from messages recorded in INTERPOL’s files and the requesting NCB’s own acknowledgment (para. 22).
In Decision 2026-06, the Commission repeated that a refusal “does not, in itself, directly affect the compliance” of the data (para. 20). Here the refusal rested on the requested State’s limitation period, “a technical matter which is country-specific” that did not prevent other member countries, bound by different limitation periods, from cooperating (para. 22). The applicant, a dual national, also complained that he had never been sought from his second country of nationality, where he lives. That country does not extradite its nationals, and the Commission pointed instead to the “swift transmission of an extradition request” to the country where he was arrested (paras. 23 and 24). The Red Notice was kept, and the refusal is to be recorded in the file under General Assembly resolution AGN/53/RES/7 (para. 25).
Earlier case law
All three decisions follow earlier ones. The formula on refusals first appears in the published excerpts in 2018, in a decision where a refusal on human rights grounds was treated as “additional evidence” and contributed to deletion (2018-03, paras. 46, 49 and 53), and 2026-02 follows that reasoning closely (paras. 22 and 23). The notification requirement it applies (para. 19) has been stated in the published excerpts since 2024: the prosecuting State “must demonstrate that it has diligently attempted to establish contact with the accused” (2024-05, para. 32).
Refusals had also been read before as evidence about the charges themselves: in 2019, refusals to cooperate raised “serious concerns as to the overall coherence of the charges” (2019-06, para. 41). In a 2017 excerpt, the Commission had decided both questions raised in 2026-06 the same way. It found it “irrelevant” that no extradition had been sought from a country that could not extradite its own national, and it kept a notice after a refusal on limitation grounds, with the refusal recorded in the file (2017-03, paras. 42 to 46).
Torture of co-defendants
Decision 2026-03 concerned a Red Notice for abduction, banditry and murder. A regional human rights court had found violations of the prohibition of torture in a case brought by co-defendants, who said the abuse took place during the investigation in the same proceedings (para. 29). The applicant said their confessions were the evidence against him.
The NCB denied that the confessions had been obtained under torture and said the case also rested on other evidence. The Commission found that the judgment, although it did not specifically concern the applicant, gave “substantial grounds” for his claim, and treated it as “an authoritative assessment” of the risks he could face if extradited (para. 30). It found the data not compliant with Article 2, and they were deleted (para. 31).
“The fact that three co-defendants were found to have been subjected to torture by an independent tribunal raises serious concerns about potential violations of human rights and due process principles regarding the Applicant should he be extradited and subjected to the criminal proceedings underlying this Red Notice.”
CCF, Decision 2026-03, para. 30
Earlier case law
The principle already appears in a 2018 excerpt: statements obtained by torture “shall not be invoked as evidence” (2018-08, para. 43; 2026-03, para. 28). In 2018-08, the prosecution appeared to rest mainly on a recanted confession (para. 44). In 2026-03, the NCB said it had other evidence, and a finding made by an independent tribunal in the co-defendants’ case was still enough for deletion.
Diffusions and the person’s known location
In Decision 2026-01, the Commission said that Article 81(3)(d) RPD, under which the General Secretariat shall cancel a notice where the requesting NCB has the data it needs to act, takes no step and gives no reasonable grounds for that, “may be applied mutatis mutandis” to Diffusions sought for arrest (para. 42). The applicant’s argument failed because he could not show that the requesting State knew his precise location (para. 43). The requested State’s Ministry of Justice had written to ask whether an extradition request would follow, but the requesting State said its prosecutor never received the letter. Given its “limited fact-finding capacity”, the Commission could not find that the requesting State had failed to act (para. 45).
Earlier case law
Earlier decisions had applied the same duty to Diffusions (2017-02, paras. 33 to 35; 2018-05, paras. 36 and 37).
Practical points for a request
- Where the summary of facts has not been disclosed, an access request may be the first step.
- Test the summary of facts against Article 83(2)(b)(i), or against Articles 12, 35, 37(h) and 99(2) for a Diffusion, and set out which act, date and place it attributes to the applicant personally. A word such as “instructed” or “promoted”, or a payment nobody explains, may not be sufficient to describe the applicant’s own conduct.
- Where there are several charges, it may help to ask which acts support each of them (2026-05, para. 20).
- An alternative account of the facts is unlikely to succeed on its own (2019-07, para. 32). In 2026-04, the applicant’s explanation of the payments counted because he supported it with documents and the NCB never answered it (paras. 13 and 23).
- Consider listing each gap in the request, so that any failure by the NCB to fill it is easier to see. Its silence, or an answer that repeats the notice, counted against the data in 2026-04 and 2026-07.
- Compare the notice with the latest judicial decision and, where possible, obtain the arrest warrant and the judgment. A notice still showing the person as wanted for prosecution after a conviction raised doubts under Article 12 in 2026-07 (paras. 22 and 23), and a missing warrant had the same effect in 2026-04 (para. 20).
- Where possible, file the full reasoned decision refusing extradition yourself, since the requested State’s NCB may not answer the Commission (2026-05, para. 22), and show how its findings concern the applicant or the description of his acts. A refusal on limitation grounds led only to a note in the file in 2026-06.
- Where the argument is that the requesting State knew where the person was and did nothing, it may help to keep proof that its authorities received the relevant correspondence (2026-01, para. 45).
- It may be worth finding out what has happened to co-defendants. A Commission decision on a co-defendant’s Diffusion (2026-05) and a regional court’s judgment obtained by co-defendants (2026-03) both counted for the applicant.
- A judgment in the co-defendants’ case can also show that no concrete act is attributed to the applicant (2026-07, para. 26).
Each excerpt can be read in full in the CCF Decisions Database, and our free INTERPOL Notice Removal Check shows which grounds may apply to a particular notice.
Charlie Magri is the founder of Otherside, a specialist law firm dedicated exclusively to INTERPOL and CCF matters. He is a former Legal Officer at the Secretariat to the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files.
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