Member countries abusing Red Notices to target reporters is a particularly heinous form of repression and political persecution. Today’s post will address specific instances of INTERPOL’s tools being used to silence or retaliate against journalists.
This issue’s prevalence has led RNLJ to cover it in the past. In 2018, Turkey’s Red Notice request against reporter Can Dündar was denied. Dündar was the former chief editor of the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet. The Committee to Protect Journalists requested that INTERPOL deny the request due to its being politically motivated, and the notice was not issued. INTERPOL rejected the Red Notice request, despite authorities’ claims that it was based on espionage charges, alleging that he disclosed state secrets in the course of his reporting.
More recently, member countries continue to target journalists notwithstanding INTERPOL’s efforts at reform over the years. The Whistler states that David Hundeyin, an investigative journalist, has alleged that desperate attempts had been made to involve him in a criminal investigation to damage his international refugee status and place him on an INTERPOL notice list, among other things. Mr. Hundeyin stated,
“This is part of the price that you have to pay when you decide to say the truth at the time it wasn’t fashionable to do so, especially a regime that sees truth-telling as an affront or threat to it,”
Additionally, earlier this year, journalist Paulo Figueiredo, testified at a US congressional hearing regarding the human rights abuses committed in Brazil and Brazilian efforts to weaponize INTERPOL against journalists. In his discussion, Mr. Figueiredo described the rampant censorship in Brazil, leading to the Brazilian government’s forced closure of a social media platform to silence his criticism.
Our work on behalf of wrongly targeted INTERPOL subjects relies in no small part on journalists’ and human rights activists’ reports. Their unfettered ability to report the truth from every corner of the world greatly impacts our capacity to provide proof to decision-making entities such as INTERPOL and courts charged with weighing issues of human and due process rights observation.
INTERPOL and the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files (CCF) have the critical and delicate burden of cautiously evaluating requests from member countries for Red Notices or diffusions against journalists.
Our next post will focus on how INTERPOL can prevent journalist targeting.
As always, thoughts and comments are welcomed.