We were lucky this time, but Moscow has infected Interpol - and there's no going back

Many feared that Wednesday’s general assembly of Interpol would elect Russian Interior Ministry General Aleksandr Prokopchuk, deeply implicated in Kremlin skulduggery, as its president.

Prokopchuk, who has been Interpol’s vice president since 2016, has helped Moscow abuse the organisation’s ‘international arrest warrants’ mechanism to hound its opponents.

Some east European countries, which had borne the brunt of those abuses, warned they would quit Interpol if he was elected. Western countries such as the UK and US also warned of consequences, including withdrawing funding or themselves leaving, and lobbied intensely for Prokopchuk’s South Korean rival candidate, Kim Jong-Yang.

In the end, after an intense campaign, the conference voted 101-61 for Kim Jong-Yang. But the fact that 61 members preferred a sinister Russian cop faithful to Vladimir Putin, the Russian dictator who takes smug delight in flouting international law, is cause for serious concern.

Next time a majority might vote for him.

Although the Russians lost this week, the episode shows, once again, how Moscow has infected political and financial institutions originally set up and, primarily, funded by the West to enable countries to conduct relations with one another on a civilised and transparent basis.

At the beginning, the founding members of these organisations were certain they could tutor the Russian Federation and other autocratic regimes in democracy and good governance. But instead of their good ways rubbing off on Moscow, the Kremlin has used corruption, oiled by billions of dollars stolen from its own people, to pervert these bodies and exploit them to advance Russia’s aggressive resurgence.

Democratic countries, rather than waste time trying to salvage these organisations, should now abandon them and set up new mechanisms comprising members committed to western values, vitally the free flow of honest, accurate information.

Interpol is supposed to be non-political, with its targets typically criminals like fraudsters, thieves on the run, international drug racketeers and terrorists. Films portray Interpol as some kind of international super cop organistion with Bond-like agents kicking down doors and capturing bad guys all over the world. In reality, it acts as a liaison for information exchange and access to criminal records between police forces in different countries.

The organisation does not arrest criminals itself, but it can issue the ‘red notices’, often called international arrest warrants, which can trigger the arrest of a criminal in any member country. The detained person can be extradited if the interested country’s lawyers can show that it is justified.

Some of the usual-suspect countries have used the red notices to try to get hold of political opponents and, even if the attempt is ultimately a failure, it results in intimidation for the target and sometimes many weeks in jail.

It’s not a surprise that one of the most frequent abusers of the red notices has been Russia, nor that General Prokopchuk has been intimately involved. A member of the Washington-based Heritage Foundation think tank, Ted Bromund, says: “There is literally no one in the world who bears a more direct and personal responsibility for Russia’s abuse of Interpol than Alexander Prokopchuk.”

Prokopchuk headed Russia’s National Central Bureau, its liaison with Interpol, from 2011 before becoming the organisation’s vice-president in 2016. Human rights monitor, the Open Dialog Foundation, found that of the 44 highest profile cases in recent times when spurious red notices were issued, Russia was responsible for 18, with another 15 issued by Kazakhstan and Belarus, both of which mimic Moscow’s autocratic ways.

It has been reported that Prokopchuk was almost certainly involved in issuing red notices to arrest an assortment of prominent UK-based enemies of Putin, including disobedient Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodrkovsky and American financier Bill Browder while they were travelling through other countries. The latter is still being hounded by Moscow because he is responsible for the US government applying stiff sanctions against Russia as part of the 2012 Magnitsky Act. Browder was so outraged by the 2009 Kremlin-ordered murder of his Russian lawyer friend Sergei Magnitsky that he lobbied the US Congress to impose the biting sanctions as punishment.

Ukraine has been in a war against Russia since 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea and occupied part of eastern Ukraine. Throughout that time Russia has used Interpol red notices to intimidate or obstruct many Ukrainian politicians, civic activists, military figures and others who have defended their country against Moscow’s aggression.

When it seemed certain their man would head Interpol, Russian politicians and media openly relished how they would use the position to harm Ukraine even more. One well-known TV host, Olga Skabeeva, boasted before an adulatory audience: “We’ll put the entire government of Ukraine in prison.”

Interpol has been sliding into disrepute even before this week. In 2016 senior Chinese politician Meng Hongwei was elected Interpol president. But this September, Meng disappeared from his French home, and weeks later it emerged he was in the hands of Chinese “discipline authorities”, who, it is rumoured, may questioning him about alleged corruption.

He’s never been seen again, but Interpol received a resignation letter purportedly signed by their president and that, apparently, was good enough.

Just two months on, and Interpol has only narrowly avoided another scandal. What’s more, despite losing the vote for president, Prokopchuk hasn’t resigned from the deputy post and will continue to exert his malign authority within Interpol.

And whether or not he can be forced out now seems irrelevant. Moscow has demonstrated time and again it’s not interested in joining international organisations in order to work in a genuinely collaborative way. It just sees opportunities to use corruption to undermine western values and corrode political mechanisms. Where illicit cash doesn’t get the desired result, Moscow has used intimidation, murder, armed aggression and the threat of nuclear attack.

Interpol, operating properly, is a useful tool for all the world. But it is not operating properly. The EU or the UN and democratic countries could relatively easily create a similar organisation which fights criminals and terrorists and does not act as an instrument for Moscow to persecute political opponents.

Rather than naively tinkering with a failed mechanism, democratic countries should send a long-overdue shock to Moscow and kiss goodbye to Interpol.