The BBC also gained access to internal Interpol reports from 2024 and 2025 which show ongoing concern around Russia’s activities from senior directors within the organisation.<\/p>\n
In one, a senior figure expresses directly to Russian delegates “serious concerns” about the country’s “wilful misuse” of Interpol systems, stating that there were instances of “flagrant violations” of Interpol rules.<\/p>\n
Despite the extra restrictions on Russia, the reports show that approximately 90% of Russia’s requests were still passing initial checks in 2024. And yet, in the same period, the CCF was overturning roughly half of all Russian requests that it received complaints about. This raises questions about whether the measures had been stringent enough.<\/p>\n
One report describes how in 2024 Russia attempted to place red diffusions on judges and a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, after the body issued arrest warrants for President Vladimir Putin and another government official for their actions in Ukraine. These requests from Moscow were rejected.<\/p>\n
Even while concerns about Russia’s misuse of Interpol’s systems were being expressed inside the organisation, the reports also show that discussions were taking place in 2024 and 2025 about whether to remove additional restrictions on Russian activity.<\/p>\n
This seems to have been settled in Moscow’s favour. The whistleblower told the BBC that in 2025 Interpol quietly dropped some extra measures against Russia \u2014 it is not clear how far this softening may have gone. Despite repeated requests, Interpol said it was not able to comment due to its “strict rules on the processing of data”.<\/p>\n
The BBC was unable to disclose all the details of the leak to Interpol as doing so could reveal the source. However, when asked about the issues raised in the investigation, Interpol said it was “concerned that a number of the accusations seems to come from a misunderstanding of how Interpol and CCF systems work, or factual errors about data and changes within Interpol’s systems”.<\/p>\n
“It is untrue to say that we prioritise police co-operation over preventing abuse \u2013 Interpol follows its constitution that expressly forbids the use of our systems on information that is of a predominantly political, military, religious or racial character.”<\/p>\n
And in the past, it has said it can do more good to prevent crimes by ensuring that lines of communication remain open.<\/p>\n
We asked Russia’s ministry of internal affairs for comment, but it did not respond.<\/p>\n
Lawyers Yuriy Nemets and Ben Keith agree that Interpol should do more to prevent misuse of its systems. “If countries are found to be significantly and persistently abusing red notices and diffusions, then they should be suspended from the system for a period of time,” says Keith.<\/p>\n
Otherwise, Igor Pestrikov fears that Russia, “with the push of a button, can enter anything, pin any crime on you – this lets them persecute you further around the world”.<\/p>\n
Additional reporting: Andreea Jitaru and Ned Davies<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The BBC also gained access to internal Interpol reports from 2024 and 2025 which show ongoing concern around…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":390793,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-390792","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390792\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/390793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}