The Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files has never hidden its delays. Three years in a row, its Chairperson has given the General Assembly the figures on CCF delays, their causes and the measures under way. In 2026 those measures started to take effect. There is a new online portal and more staff, and a case management system is due to follow. The Commission has also received more requests this year than ever before. At an American Bar Association webinar on 24 July 2026, the Chairperson gave a detailed update on both.
The pressure is not unique to the CCF. Courts and regulators in several countries report a similar rise in filings, and some of them put part of it down to artificial intelligence.
CCF delays before the portal
Article 40 of the CCF Statute gives the Commission four months from admissibility to decide an access request and nine months to decide a deletion request. As requests have grown, both deadlines have become harder to keep.
The 2023 annual report found that these deadlines were missed in about 30 percent of access requests and 15 percent of deletion requests. The late cases took on average seven to eight months for access and 12 to 15 months for deletion. We discussed those figures in our review of the 2023 annual report. The next year was harder. According to the 2024 annual report, only 30 percent of access requests were finalised within four months, and 30 percent of deletion requests went beyond nine months, twice the share of the year before (our analysis). The report adds that part of these late cases involved an extension for exceptional circumstances under Article 40(3). It also notes that the Commission receives more than 82,000 emails a year. The causes it gives are the rise in requests and the backlog from earlier years, resources that had not kept pace, late answers from the General Secretariat on whether data exist, requests for extensions from National Central Bureaus, more complex cases, large volumes of submissions, and long exchanges over restrictions on disclosure.
“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.”
CCF Annual Activity Report for 2024, para. 73
Teresa McHenry, the CCF Chairperson, did not play down the outlook when she presented that report to the General Assembly in Marrakech in November 2025:
“Unfortunately, I believe that in 2025, our numbers will be even worse in terms of delays, for a variety of reasons including an increase in the number of cases and the time and resources needed to hire new staff and develop new tools.”
Teresa McHenry, CCF Chairperson, INTERPOL General Assembly, Marrakech, November 2025
She added that the Commission hoped the 2026 figures would “start showing improvement” once new staff and new IT tools were in place. Charlie Magri, Ted Bromund and Sandra Grossman discussed the same report, and the procedural reforms that came after it, in the International Enforcement Law Reporter.
Filing through the portal
Since 26 March 2026, new requests can only be filed through the CCF portal. Email and post are no longer accepted unless the Commission finds exceptional circumstances under Rule 25(2) of its Operating Rules. The Commission wants complete requests, one secure channel for messages and procedural updates, and less Secretariat time spent on correspondence. The Secretariat is also building an internal case management system. We reported the portal announcement at the time and went through the practical consequences in our guide from March.
The CCF Portal User Guide and the Operating Rules also tighten the format: a summary of arguments of no more than 10 pages for a deletion request (Rule 30(8)(a)), a cap of 20 appendices, links in place of copies for public web pages, and a separate request for each applicant and each type of request. An application for revision now opens with a two-page summary of the newly discovered facts.
Cases opened before 26 March, which the CCF calls legacy cases, stay on email for now. The Commission aims to have the basics of the case management system running by the end of 2026 or early 2027 and to import all cases into it at that point.
The Chairperson’s update in July
The ABA webinar, “INTERPOL’s Redress Mechanism: Latest Trends, Reforms and Jurisprudence,” took place on 24 July 2026. Bruce Zagaris moderated. The panel was the CCF Chairperson, Yaron Gottlieb of the Notices and Diffusions Task Force, Ted Bromund, Michelle Estlund and Yuriy Nemets. The recording is available on demand, and several of the figures given on the day have not been published anywhere else.
The Commission had braced for a temporary dip while users got used to the portal. It never came. In the Chairperson’s words, “it appears that persons learn very quickly.” After a spike in the first two weeks, requests settled well above last year’s level. By June the CCF was receiving about 125 requests a week through the portal, against an average of about 85 in 2025. That is a rise of close to half in a year. If the pace holds, the Chairperson said, the Commission could receive between 5,000 and 6,000 requests in 2026.
About 55 percent of new requests are now access requests and 45 percent deletion requests. According to the Chairperson, last year’s split was roughly the other way round.
The Commission cannot say for certain what is driving the increase, and said so. The portal explains some of it, since it is easier to use and forces completeness. Duplication is another source. The Secretariat had found about 240 cases in which a legacy request had been filed again on the portal. That is real extra work, though it does not account for the whole rise. Some of the cause may lie outside the portal altogether. The Chairperson mentioned the growing use of AI as one possible factor, while making clear that the Commission is not sure.
Her 2025 prediction proved right, she said: the year turned out worse. For 2026 she said it was too early to be certain:
“It appears we’ll see an improvement in delays for access request, but not for deletion requests.”
Teresa McHenry, CCF Chairperson, ABA webinar, 24 July 2026
New staff have been recruited and more may follow (we looked at what additional resources could change in 2024). Hiring and training take time, though, and the new IT tools are expected to pay off gradually.
Asked whether the CCF uses AI to review submissions, she said it does not. Translation tools may sometimes be used. The Commission is also looking at whether AI could help identify related cases. It “is not [going to] be used for decision making,” she said, and not without human review.
Other courts, same curve
Courts and regulators in several countries report the same rise in filings, and some say publicly that AI is part of the reason.
In the United States, Anand Shah of MIT and Joshua Levy of the University of Southern California studied 4.5 million federal civil cases. Self-represented litigants filed 11 percent of lawsuits in 2022 and 16.8 percent in 2025, and the share of sampled filings flagged as containing AI-generated text rose from 1 percent in 2023 to 18 percent in 2026 (SSRN; MIT Technology Review).
In the United Kingdom, applications for interim relief before the Employment Tribunals went from about 20 a year to about 20 a month. The Presidents issued guidance in June 2026, linking the rise to litigants’ use of AI and noting that other users bear the cost in postponed hearings (Law Society Gazette).
In France, new cases before the administrative tribunals went from 257,000 in 2023 to more than 370,000. Opening the judicial year on 9 September 2026, the vice-president of the Conseil d’Etat, Marc Guillaume, counted “l’utilisation de l’intelligence artificielle” among the causes and warned of a longer time to judgment (Conseil d’Etat).
The closest comparison to the CCF may be a data protection authority. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission reported a 45 percent rise in complaints in 2025, to 16,160 new cases, and said many involved AI-generated submissions (Irish Legal News).
None of this shows that AI is behind the CCF’s numbers, and the Commission has not said so. It does show that other bodies handling written applications are dealing with a similar rise.
A possible effect on outcomes
The share of decided deletion requests found compliant has been rising for some time, from about 26 percent in 2022 to just over 31 percent in 2023 and 40 percent in 2024, a trend the CCF has linked in part to better cooperation from National Central Bureaus. Our expectation, and it is only that, is that a growing number of requests drafted without the facts and documents on which a deletion request depends could reinforce it. The next annual reports will show whether that is right.
What the CCF expects for delays in 2026
The CCF has done most of what it said it would. The portal works and users took to it quickly. Staff are being recruited, and the case management system is on its way. Demand has grown faster than expected, though. On the Commission’s own assessment, deletion requests are not expected to improve this year, and those are the requests that decide whether a Red Notice stays or goes. Applicants and representatives filing a deletion request this year should be prepared for a decision that may come well beyond the nine-month deadline.
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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