Established in 1923 to help state agents to “work together to make the world a safer place, the International Criminal Police Organization or the Interpol is an inter-governmental organization headquartered in Lyon, France. The Philippines has been a member of the Interpol since June 12, 1952.
According to Rappler, the Interpol’s first iteration was established in 1923, and currently has 196 member countries whose national law enforcement agencies ideally work together to fight crime across borders or those that go beyond their respective jurisdictions.
The Interpol’s website describes that this is done by helping each country “share and access data” on crimes and criminals, which can be found also in the 19 police databases managed by the Interpol general secretariat.
These databases contain information — from fingerprints, to stolen passports — that can be accessed by member-countries.
Its mission is to help police agencies around the world work together to fight international crime. Each member country has a National Central Bureau that connects their law enforcement with other countries, and the General Secretariat.
The NCBs work with law enforcement agencies in their own country, other NCBs and Sub-Bureaus around the world, and the General Secretariat’s offices worldwide, offering police a high-tech infrastructure of technical and operational support to meet the growing challenges posed by criminals.
The Interpol is funded by contributions from member-countries, as well as voluntary funding from partnerships.
In 2023, the Interpol raised 176 million euros to fund its activities, such as issuing a Notice (color-coded by their function: red, blue, green, yellow, black, orange, and purple), an international alert circulated to communicate information about crimes, criminals, and threats by police in a member-state (or an authorized international entity) to their counterparts around the world.
Notices are often issued upon the request of a country or by international bodies such as the International Criminal Court; majority of Notices are “restricted to law enforcement use only”. The receipt of an Interpol Red Notice refers to the location/arrest of a person wanted by a judicial jurisdiction or an international tribunal with a view to extradition.
Former President Duterte has been arrested after the International Criminal Court based in The Hague in the Netherlands issued an arrest warrant over alleged crimes against humanity, nearly nine years after he launched his nationwide war on drugs that left more than 6,000 people dead in police operations, tied to the drug war killings that claimed up to 30,000 lives, including victims of vigilante-style executions, during his term of office from 2016 to 2022.
FPRRD will face the ICC accusations that he committed crimes against humanity during his deadly war on drugs.
His detention follows years of him rebuking and taunting the ICC in profanity-laden speeches since he unilaterally withdrew the Philippines from the court’s founding treaty in 2019, as it started looking into allegations of systematic murders of drug dealers on his watch.
The ICC has jurisdiction to investigate alleged crimes that took place while a country was a member.
What now?
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Author’s email: whelmayap@yahoo.com
