Historical Overview

In times far removed from today’s awareness of “globalisation”, the insight that crime was not limited to a specific territory and that, on the contrary, mobility made it possible to easily elude controls by national police forces, led Prince Albert I of Monaco to convene the “First International Conference of Criminal Police” in April 1914.

Great ideas are born out of a state of need. In this case, it was the frustration of the Prince of Monaco who, having been robbed by his lover, realised that it would be impossible to pursue her legally because she had fled to Italy together with her accomplice.

For the first time, visionary police officers from 24 countries and several continents came together representating Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cuba, Denmark, Egypt, El Salvador, France, Germany, Guatemala, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Monaco, Persia, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The second international conference – scheduled for 1916 in Romania – was never held because of the First World War, but in 1923 the Chief of Austrian Police, Dr. Johann Schober, took up the Prince of Monaco’s idea, convening the “2nd International Conference of Criminal Police”. The decision was made to create the “International Criminal Police Commission – ICPC” with an international office as its permanent headquarters in Vienna and an annual general meeting to be held in the various capitals of its member countries.

The first International Central Police Office was organised into different departments responsible for counterfeit banknotes, fingerprints, counterfeit passports, drug traffickers and dangerous criminals. French was the working language of the Commission, but German, English and Italian were also used.

The first international police review, “International Public Safety”, was published in 1925, which included a global list of wanted criminals. This was the first rudimentary instrument of international criminal intelligence and began the collection, at the headquarters, of photographs and fingerprints of wanted people, missing persons, and images of stolen objects and works of art. By 1933, the office had a list of 3,240 wanted persons in its archives, filed according to type of crime.

A radio-telegraphy connection system was acquired in 1935, making it possible for the first time to connect the police offices of 10 different European capitals. At the time, the Organisation included 34 member countries and had an autonomous budget.

The last general meeting before the Second World War was held in Bucharest in June 1938. Foreseeing the consequences of the annexation of Austria by Germany, France attempted, unsuccessfully, to obtain a decision on the transfer of the head office from Vienna to Geneva, which was already home to the League of Nations.

In the dark years that followed, the chair of the Commission was given to Germany and the head office moved to Berlin. Coming under the authority of the Reich’s Central Security Office, the International Criminal Police Office was headed by a German director and no further general meetings were held until after the war.

In June 1946, the Belgian minister of justice initiated the 15th general meeting, which was convened in Brussels. During the meeting, which was attended by 17 countries, represented by 45 delegates, a Belgian was elected to chair the Organisation with a French general secretary, budget assessments were determined, the Articles of Association (constitution) were rewritten, and Paris was designated as the Commission’s new permanent head office.

On a day-to-day basis, the term INTERPOL was used as an abbreviation for “International Police”, but it was only at the General Assembly held in Paris in 1947 that a motion proposed by an Italian state police officer, Dr. Giuseppe Dosi, was approved to allow the National Central Criminal Police Offices to be called INTERPOL, followed by the name of the location of the country’s head office (i.e., Interpol Rome, Interpol Paris, etc.).

In the past 50 years, the Organisation has made significant strides forward. Today, Interpol has 186 member countries, each with a national central bureau, a General Secretariat located in Lyon (France), five regional offices (Côte d’Ivoire, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Argentina, San Salvador), a liaison office in Thailand and an office at the United Nations in New York, which opened in 2005.

The story of Interpol is its capacity to resist, reinforce, renew itself and rise again. This capacity testifies to the validity of the system, loyalty to an idea and the stubbornness that, all over the world, is characteristic of those who have chosen crime fighting as a profession.

The Principles of Interpol Cooperation

The principles that inspired the Interpol Constitution may be identified as:

a) Solidarity and National Sovereignty, Art.2:

• To ensure and promote the widest possible mutual assistance between all criminal police authorities within the limits of the laws existing in the different countries and in the spirit of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”;
• To establish and develop all institutions likely to contribute effectively to the prevention and suppression of ordinary law crimes.

b) Impartiality and no political bias, Art.3:

• It is strictly forbidden for the Organisation to undertake any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character.

c) Fairness and independence, Art.13:

• Each individual State enjoys the same voting rights at the General Assembly.

Interpol is a cooperative organisation serving the world’s police forces. Existing regulatory, ordinance, cultural, economic and linguistic differences are overcome through the pursuit of a single objective: the fight against crime and international terrorism.

The success of multilateral cooperation in police matters cannot be obtained without the flexibility that allows each member State to cooperate in those areas authorised by national legislation and each investigator to consider the sensitivity of the requirements of the investigation.

For example, each State retains ownership of its information data with the possibility of selecting the countries to which it is willing to grant access to such data via Interpol; each State is sovereign in establishing the legal value at national level of a wanted person notice; each State decides the level of access to the Interpol data banks, their enrichment and their consultation.

Interpol is an intergovernmental organisation based on a Constitution, whose legitimacy is recognised by the United Nations. In fact, Interpol enjoys observer status at the General Assembly of the United Nations and has a Representative Office at the UN in New York. Interpol is also included in many international Conventions, as a special instrument for exchanging information and forwarding official documents pertaining to judicial cooperation.

Some continue to consider that the adoption of an Interpol Convention would give the Organisation more credibility and, above all, legal force. On the other hand, others maintain that this would give rise to a regulatory and structural rigidity, not to mention greater control and interference powers to the member States.

Interpol’s independence has always been the Organisation’s strong claim, to the extent that the Constitution guarantees its apolitical and neutral status.

It was only at the General Assembly in 1984 that a majority of States agreed on the expediency of extending the Organisation’s competencies to include terrorism acts, by adopting a resolution of historical importance which opened the way to a different viewpoint on Interpol’s involvement in the fight against terrorism.

Since the attacks in New York, Bali, Madrid, London, and Sharm El-Sheik, the willingness of police forces to cooperate has been significantly strengthened. In fact, the awareness that no country in the world is exempt from the danger of terrorism has marked a significant shift in the culture of sharing information that may be useful for investigating as well as preventing crime.

While in the past international cooperation was only sought in cases of letters rogatory or when it was necessary to obtain information in order to carry out a national investigation, this point of view has now changed. International security is a common good to be safeguarded by contributions that may be proactively provided by each individual State.

In the past, if a policeman needed to know the name of a foreign telephone user, he would be very careful with regard to providing any other elements of information relating to the investigation. The international cooperation channel was considered to be a simple means of communication to facilitate the obtaining of a maximum amount of information from other police forces and provide the strict minimum justification for the request. Absence of trust and jealously guarding of the investigation data were characteristic of the policeman’s mindset, with obvious negative repercussions on international cooperation.

Today, there is an increasing willingness to pool information packages that may establish the common denominator for multilateral investigations, for the purpose of establishing criminal analyses or even for the sole purpose of providing all the States with the maximum amount of necessary information in order to tighten the mesh of routine controls.

Institutional Organs

The Constitution additionally regulates the functions of Interpol’s institutional organs.

The General Assembly is the supreme deliberation organ. It is composed of delegations representing the governments of member States, meets once a year for its ordinary meeting, and deliberates with simple or qualified majority. The Assembly guarantees the respect of the Constitution, establishes the Organisation’s strategic and operational priorities, approves the accounts, adopts regulatory reforms, and elects the members of the Executive Committee, the President and the General Secretary.

The President is elected for a four-year mandate. He or she presides over the General Assembly sessions and the meetings of the Executive Committee, guarantees that the decisions adopted by the Organisation’s executive organs are applied, and works with the General Secretary.

The Executive Committee consists of the President, three Vice-Presidents and nine Delegates. The thirteen members of the Executive Committee are elected on the basis of equal geographical spread, they do not represent the State to which they belong on the Committee and they are held to represent the exclusive interests of the Organisation.

The Committee meets three times a year and carries out the following functions:

• ensuring that the decisions adopted by the Assembly are fully applied;
• preparing the agenda of the General Assembly sessions;
• approving the programme of activities and the budget before they are put to the approval of the General Assembly;
• overseeing the management of the General Secretary’s activities.

The General Secretary is proposed by the Executive Committee for election by the General Assembly, for a renewable period of five years. He or she represents the Organisation, is responsible for managing the activities of the whole General Secretariat and the Regional Offices, manages the budget, and undertakes all the necessary measures for enacting the decisions of the General Assembly and the Executive Committee.

National Central Offices operate according to their respective national legislations and inasmuch as they are the interface of the General Secretary and the corresponding Offices in the 186 member States, they are the true force of the Organisation because they constitute the network of connections on which the Interpol police system is founded. The National Offices are, in fact, the end users of Interpol’s services and, at the same time, the source of the information resources that constitute the Organisation’s lifeblood.

Interpol at Work

Conscious of the intrinsic limitations of multilateral cooperation, Interpol has indeed never had the ambition of becoming a police force with its own investigative and operational powers. On the contrary, it has always structured its priorities and functions around the respect and recognition of the powers and differences between national police forces and legislations. Based on this presupposition, Interpol is an instrument serving all the world’s investigators who have the right/duty to use it in order to overcome regulatory, operational, cultural and linguistic barriers in order to improve the efficiency of opposition to transnational crime.

Interpol is an instrument for cooperation and harmonisation whose processes and actions seek to support the policeman who, for example, needs to communicate in real time with a colleague in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe; who needs to quickly find out if the passport of a passenger in transit in Italy has been stolen elsewhere in whatever city of the world; if the DNA found at the site of a crime corresponds to a profile that is already known to foreign police forces; if the car used for a bomb attack has been declared stolen in another country or if the type of explosive has already been used in other attacks or has been stolen.

To meet its objective of international cooperation, Interpol has identified a number of priorities and functions that we shall attempt to summarily describe without, however, claiming to provide an exhaustive description of all the Organisation’s activities.

The I 24/7 Communication System: I for Interpol, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. This will go down in history as the system that revolutionised multilateral police cooperation. It is a computerised platform that allows all Interpol countries to communicate with each other and with the General Secretariat, to access the Interpol data banks and to exchange information, photographs, and fingerprints in real time with maximum IT security.

Each police operator who is authorised to access the system can, based on his or her own competencies, specialise his or her “web page” so as to make use of all the available Interpol information and services in order to compare a specific crime scene, develop a network of contacts with others operating in the sector, or create protected “international files” relating to specific investigations.

The flexibility of the system has allowed many States to increase its power at the national level, by granting access for consultation purposes to certain data banks – principally passports and stolen cars – to all police services operating in that territory and, in particular, at the border controls. The revolutionary implications of the system are obvious because it allows an operator at ports, airports or border areas to check, in real time, if a travel document has been stolen or counterfeited anywhere in the world.

The importance of the travel document data bank is a relatively simple response to a complex problem. The globalisation of crime cannot be separated from the mobility of criminals. Suitable measures that hinder their movements constitute a significant step towards the prevention of major crime and terrible terrorist attacks.

Data Banks. In order to ensure that all the police forces in the world have access to the information they need in order to prevent crime and to identify and arrest criminals, Interpol can avail itself of worldwide data banks that include names, fingerprints, DNA profiles, stolen passports, counterfeit bank notes, stolen vehicles and works of art. One particularly significant element is the data bank for child pornography, which contains thousands of pictures of abused minors and has proven itself useful in identifying numerous victims and the perpetrators.

Recent years have seen a more than 100% increase in the input and consultation of Interpol data banks by the member States, and this has led to doubling both the number of arrests carried out and of positive police checks.

The value of this international memory for police activities goes without saying. By way of example, we can take the case of terrorist Abdelmajid BOUCHAR, who was suspected of having taken part in the Madrid bombings on 11 March 2004. The object of an international search warrant put out by Spain, Bouchar travelled as a fugitive in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Hungary. Arrested in Budapest and later in Serbia because he did not have any identity documents, he declared himself to be Midhat SALAH of Iraqi nationality. A check of his fingerprints using the Interpol I 24/7 channel made it possible to identify him and extradite him very quickly to Spain.

The possibility of carrying out cross checks of information provided by 186 member States, makes the world considerably smaller for criminals.

The wanted persons list system has, in recent years, been completely computerised in order to make it compatible and usable via the I 24/7 platform. Urgent search requests are drawn up in the four official languages (English, French, Spanish and Arabic) and circulated within twenty-four hours from the original request. The time factor is obviously crucial for success when dealing with persons on the run.

But time reduction is not the only factor; the quality of the images transmitted has also significantly improved and hence the reliability of the fingerprints and identity photos.

The “notices” system includes five different types of search requests:

The most recent creation is the “Interpol – United Nations Special Notice”, to search for and locate individuals and groups associated with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, who are listed on the UN list and subjected to Security Council-approved sanctions such as confiscation of property, prohibition of carrying arms and inadmissibility on the territory.

Command and Coordination Centre. The General Secretariat has an “ops room” which, independently from time zones, national holidays and language differences, permanently controls all Interpol services. Specialised staff answer in real time all requests for urgent assistance; they monitor open sources to be able to meet possible emergencies; with the interested States, they coordinate the intervention of specialist units in crisis situations or major events such as terrorist attacks, natural disasters, sporting events or summits. For example, from the site of the disaster it is possible to connect with the Interpol data banks for quick certification of all clues that may be evidential or useful for the purposes of the inquiry; assess the quality of the evidence, such as fingerprints, in order to verify their reliability; draw up and circulate “search requests”, and identify corpses using Interpol’s forms and specialised units network. All this and more can be undertaken in the immediate time and space of the event.

Regional Offices. As already stated, Interpol has 186 members and is the largest global organisation after the United Nations, as far as the number of participant States is concerned. Obviously, such a wide diversity also expresses substantial differences in criminal realities and the capacities for opposing them. Consequently, Interpol must be able to offer differentiated services and subsidies that take into account the various levels of specialisation, available infrastructures and strategic priorities of the national police forces.

Alongside those countries that can avail themselves of sophisticated investigation technologies, consolidated experience and specialist software for analysing investigation data, supported by large budgets and specialised human resources, Interpol hosts countries that are sometimes lacking even basic resources. Such countries do not even have a sniffing dog unit for intercepting explosives or drugs, that do not have computerised national archives or enough vehicles, that need training to learn investigation techniques capable of opposing illicit trafficking or, even more basically, that don’t know how to use a computer.

While today’s criminal activities are often globalised – drug and human trafficking, financial crime, terrorism, child pornography, clandestine immigration, etc. – there are others that are typically regional such as, for example, the “maras e pandillas” in North and Central America, high-sea piracy in Asia, environmental crimes and gem trafficking in Africa.

To try and satisfy such complex demands, Interpol has developed specialist units according to crime types, which are capable of coordinating international investigations, collecting data and drawing up tactical and strategic analyses. It also has five sub-regional offices – three in Africa, two in Central/Southern America and a liaison office in Asia – to be able to offer solutions, both in operational terms and for training, that are more in line with regional needs.

These Offices also operate as secretariats for the meetings of the Country Chiefs of Police in the region in order to ensure the coordination of Interpol activities and priorities along the strategic lines and contingencies identified in the specific regional areas. One example is the role played by Interpol in coordinating the activities to identify the victims of the Tsunami that hit South East Asia in December 2004. The management centre for victim identification set up in Phuket greatly facilitated the centralisation of all ante and post mortem data – as did the adoption of the Interpol protocol for homologating data collection and quality – and the high reliability of the technical criteria and the precision of the comparisons.

Each of these areas of criminal activity is covered by:

• analysis files for processing the information collected in the context of each project;
• small work groups for exchanging information and undertaking coordinated investigations;
• operational meetings;
• training sessions relating to specialised investigation techniques in areas such as bioterrorism or computer crime;
• alert systems for circulating bulletins relating, for example, to new drugs, modus operandi, criminal trends, etc.;
• specialised data banks, such as the one relating to theft of radioactive or biological materials;
• conferences hosting broader constituencies to include nongovernmental organisations, for example, other international organisations, the private sector.

Interpol-Europol Cooperation

Why was a European Police Office created if Interpol already existed? Is this not needless duplication? Are not the 25 member States of the European Union also members of Interpol? Are the two Organisations competing or cooperating?

Finding answers to these questions by examining the respective competencies of Interpol and Europol, in order to show their complementarities, runs the risk of becoming a purely theoretical exercise.

Answers to these questions should instead be sought in the historical origins and political motivations behind the creation of Europol.

The creation of a common space of freedom, justice and security, the adoption of a single currency, and the enlargement and integration of the European Union could not be undertaken apart from a reinforcement of security measures and, consequently, the creation of an ad hoc organisation for cooperation among the police forces of the EU.

In fact, the institution of a European Police Office in the context of “Justice and Home Affairs” cooperation was the obvious and logical consequence of the reorganisation of community institutions and the European Union’s activities and policies following the Maastricht Treaty.

Interpol, on the other hand, as a worldwide Organisation that is apolitical and, above all, independent from any decision-making powers deriving from the will of a limited number of State groupings, could certainly not be considered an Organisation to be integrated in the mechanisms that are specific to the European Union.

It is sufficient to reflect on the procedures and decision-making mechanisms of the two organisations to notice a first substantial difference between them.

Interpol has an Executive Committee consisting of 13 members who represent equally the five continents. The said Committee prepares the decisions which must then be adopted by the General Assembly, in which the Chiefs of Police of the 186 member States take part and where every State has one vote and where every resolution is adopted by the majority.

Europol has a Board consisting of the representatives of the Ministry of the Interior of the 25 member States. This Board reports – by way of a complex bureaucratic path – to the Council of Ministers of Justice and Home Affairs, which makes its decisions unanimously. It is the Council which defines the priorities of Europol, approves its annual financial report and establishes the budget.

Europol, therefore, even though it purports to be an organisation for police cooperation, is an institution that fits into the more complex architecture of the European Union, which regulates and ordains Europol’s activities.

To inappropriately use a metaphor for the sole purpose of simplifying the concept, we can say that the European Police Office could be considered the “operational arm” of the strategic policies and decisions adopted for security issues by the Council of Ministers of Justice and Home Affairs of the European Union.

This first difference between the two organisations does not therefore only concern their geographical scope – one being global, the other regional – but also a more complex reality in terms of representativeness, of protection of interests, of priorities, of independence.

Many press articles describe Europol as the European FBI. Though incorrect, the comparison does have certain affinities that are worth highlighting. Even though Europol is not the federal police agency of the European Union – in matters of internal security the principle of national sovereignty still prevails – it may nevertheless be considered the European Union’s agency for police cooperation among the member States.

The close relationship existing between Europol and the European Union explains why Interpol would not have been able to meet the institutional requirements of the European Union and why Europol will never be able to replace Interpol.

From this point of view, the differences between the two organisations stand out quite clearly. One may rightly wonder whether the misunderstanding about duplication with respect to Interpol might not have been avoided by giving Europol another name that would have distinguished its role and functions, without creating confusion with similar already existing organisations.

Having explained the whys and wherefores of the creation of Europol and its distinguishing differences with respect to Interpol, one may wonder if and how these two organisations interact with each other.

Cooperation between these two organisations suffers in particular from their different regulatory structures.

The Interpol system and the flexibility that characterises it have been described in previous paragraphs. Among other things we have highlighted the Organisation’s constant commitment to safeguarding the full autonomy of the member States when it defines the terms and conditions for multilateral cooperation.

The legal architecture of Europol, on the other hand, comes across as rather complex because it has sought to regulate in detail the Organisation’s activities in an attempt to harmonise the requirements of the different national legislations and ensure their regulatory and institutional control.

The European Police Office is based on a Convention and on a significant number of regulations that have been approved and ratified by the national parliaments of the 25 E.U. countries.

It is worth noting, however, that the “delegations” given by the member States to the Union’s organisation for police cooperation suffer from excessive caution and this has ultimately straight-jacketed Europol’s potential.

A practical example can help to understand our claim.

Recently, with a view to wide-ranging cooperation and optimisation of resources, Interpol offered Europol a connection to its I 24/7 system that would have granted it access to all Interpol’s data banks.

Though welcomed, this initiative was not followed up as Europol had to decline the offer because of legal obstacles in the Convention.

In fact, if after consulting Interpol’s data bank Europol had encountered a “link” with information it already possessed, it would have been legally unable to notify the existence of such a link both to the General Secretariat and to Interpol’s National Offices in those States that might have been interested in such a link.

Regulations concerning the exchange of data state that Europol may only pass on information to Europol’s National Units in the 25 Member Countries. With regard to countries outside the EU, a bilateral cooperation agreement is required, the scope of which disciplines the nature of the data, its transmissibility and the designation of the National Office of the third party country that is competent to receive Europol’s information.

In other words if, based on the information in its possession, Europol sees from Interpol’s data bank that a car has been stolen in Libya and used for a terrorist attack in Madrid, it may not notify this link either to the Interpol Office in Madrid or to Interpol’s General Secretariat for further notification to the Interpol Office in Tripoli, nor directly to the Libyan police.

The only Office authorised to receive this information, unknown to the Interpol channel, would therefore be the Europol National Unit in Madrid, because Spain is a member of the European Union. Another case would be if an agreement concerning operational cooperation exists between Europol and Libya, the Office designated by the latter as Europol’s reference might not coincide with the national Interpol Office.

The reality is much more complex than the theory: it might in fact happen that a name included in the Interpol data bank by a Country outside of the European Union and with which Europol has no cooperation agreement, might appear in a Europol “analysis file” as being a terrorist suspected elsewhere in Europe of organising a terrorist attack. Europol would not be allowed to share this information either with the General Secretariat or with a third party country.

The complexity of the system and, above all, the fragile nature of the principle of reciprocity are obvious, even though the latter is an undisputed cornerstone of any form of cooperation.

Interpol and Europol, based on the agreement signed in November 2001, have developed a form of cooperation that is essentially strategic.

The limitations of the Europol Convention relating to the transmission of personal data and the absence of correspondence in the classification of information of the two organisations, significantly reduces the possibilities of cooperation.

Joint projects have indeed been developed to combat counterfeiting of the euro, clandestine immigration, child pornography, drug trafficking, terrorism and cyber crime.

However, these are projects that do not include the exchange of personal information and therefore are of little use when it comes to investigations. At the most, they concern strategic analyses, alert messages, investigative technique manuals, training programmes.

This whole issue offers even more food for thought if one considers that 70% of the information exchanged via Interpol has been provided by the European States.

One may therefore ask why, having created the European Police Office, do the Union’s Member States continue to so massively use the Interpol channel?

In fact, the creation of the Europol units has not led to the suppression of the national Interpol offices. On the contrary, all the Union’s countries have created services that articulate both the Interpol Office and Europol so as to encourage their interaction also at the national level.

The answer is therefore to be sought, once again, in the diversity and complementarities of the two organisations.

Obviously, Interpol, with the cooperation agreements that exist among its 186 member States, guarantees a network of connections and operational capacities that extend far beyond the borders of the European Union.

Interpol, rather than developing highly specialised intelligence activities that presuppose the processing of sensitive data and a high level of availability among collaborating States, has preferred to focus its attention on services designed to facilitate the task of the investigator and police operator.

From this point of view, it has given priority to technology and secure police communications, to creating and feeding international data banks, to operational support of various kinds, and to training.

On the other hand, Europol may be defined as the European crime intelligence office, because it has been equipped with a highly refined and powerful strategic and tactical analysis department.

The regulatory rigidity of the Europol system previously referred to thus becomes a strength when processing sensitive data, because it guarantees the discretion, integrity and accurateness of such data.

A correct use of the two structures depends also to a large extent on the capacity of the member States of both Organisations to make maximum use of their services by strengthening their diversity and exploiting their full potential.

Roraima Andriani is the director of cabinet of chief of staff at Interpol’s General Secretariat in Lyon, France. An Italian police officer, she previously spent five years at Europol in The Hague, Netherlands, as a liaison officer dealing with investigative and international cooperation.