The Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files (CCF) has published the dates of its upcoming sessions and announced that, beginning in 2026, it will run a pilot aimed at ensuring that its decision-making process is more evenly managed across the year.
What CCF sessions are and why they matter
As explained in a previous post, the CCF’s sessions are periodic meetings where the CCF members review, discuss, and make decisions on issues, projects, and individual requests submitted to the Commission. CCF members, who are elected by INTERPOL’s General Assembly, include seven individuals from different legal, academic, and human rights backgrounds. They do not work full-time at INTERPOL’s Lyon headquarters and generally meet only during scheduled sessions. Between sessions, the CCF is supported by its Secretariat, a permanent body led by a Secretary who operates under the Commission’s authority.
In practice, sessions are therefore the key moments when individual requests are formally deliberated by the Commission and when decisions are adopted.
The 2026 pilot announced by the CCF
According to the information published by the CCF, the 2026 pilot includes the following elements:
- Increased use of remote, online case reviews by members;
- Expanded delegation of power to the Rapporteur and Chairperson for appropriate non-complex cases;
- Three longer sessions scheduled across the year;
- The option to convene a fourth session in December if required.
The dates of the three sessions currently scheduled for 2026 are:
- 136th session: 28 January to 10 February 2026
- 137th session: 3 June to 16 June 2026
- 138th session: 30 September to 13 October 2026
Fewer sessions, longer sittings
This calendar reflects a clear change in format compared to recent practice. For the past few years, the Commission has typically held four sessions per year, each lasting five days. Under the 2026 pilot, the CCF is moving to three scheduled sessions, each lasting close to two weeks.
This shift is coherent with the Resolution adopted by the General Assembly at the 92nd General Assembly in November 2024, under which the number of permissible working days for CCF members has been significantly increased from 26 to 80 for members and up to 125 for the Chair starting in 2026.
Processing times and operational constraints
The significance of this pilot becomes clearer when read alongside the CCF’s most recent Annual Activity Report. As detailed in the CCF 2024 Annual Report, the Commission continues to operate under sustained workload pressure and faces structural challenges in meeting statutory deadlines.
The report provides precise figures on processing times:
“In 2024, 30 per cent of access requests were finalized within four months and 70 per cent were not.”
“For deletion requests, 70 per cent were completed within nine months, and 30 per cent were not.”
Despite record productivity and a high number of closed cases, the report confirms that delays remain a structural issue rather than a temporary fluctuation.
These concerns were explicitly addressed by the CCF Chairperson, Teresa McHenry, in her speech to the INTERPOL General Assembly (93rd Session, Marrakech, 24–27 November 2025). She identified workload and delays as a continuing priority for 2026, while also acknowledging that delays were expected to worsen in the short term before any improvement becomes visible.
What practitioners and applicants may reasonably expect
Longer session windows, combined with remote reviews and delegated handling of non-complex cases, may allow the Commission to review and decide a greater volume of cases during each session cycle.
This does not amount to a guarantee of faster outcomes for individual requests. It does, however, provide a reasonable basis for practitioners and applicants to expect a more sustained decision-making rhythm during each session and potentially more continuity across the year, compared to a model based on shorter, more fragmented sittings.
