Russia may withdraw from Interpol – the international criminal police organization, whose members are 195 countries of the world. This is evidenced by the documents of Interpol, published at the end of the 91st session of the General Assembly of the organization, which was held from November 28 to December 1, 2023 in Vienna, drew the attention of lawyer Sergei Zhorin.
During the assembly, notes Zhorin, considered the issue of restricting Russia’s access to the Interpol search database. Such an option was proposed by a working group of countries, which earlier sought Russia’s exclusion from the organization for political persecution that violated its charter.
Closing the search database would put Russia in an extremely unpleasant position: as a result, it would have to continue to pay contributions to the Interpol budget, but would lose the basic right of a member country. The Russian side responded with Report GA-2023-91-REP-11 “on expulsion from membership of the organization”, according to Interpol documents published by Zhorin.
This suggests that the Russian Federation plans to act proactively and withdraw from Interpol on its own initiative, the lawyer concludes.
Earlier, the head of the Russian Interior Ministry Vladimir Kolokoltsev spoke about the problems with Interpol, of which the USSR became a member in 1990, and Russia as its legal successor immediately after the collapse of the Union. On December 5, he said that Interpol had introduced a special regime for processing Russian requests to place information about wanted persons in its databases, which “reduces the effectiveness” of such activities. Such steps were taken “under far-fetched pretexts”, Kolokoltsev said, hinting that Russia might consider withdrawing from Interpol.
“A sovereign state should decide on its own whether to join or withdraw from it if participation has ceased to meet the interests of the state itself”, Kolokoltsev said.
