The Accountability of Transnational Policing Institutions: The Strange Case of Interpol

Canadian Journal of Law and Society

Volumn 19, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 107-134

  Sheptycki, James ^a  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247653754     PISSN: 08293201     EISSN: 19110227     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0829320100007973     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. See J.W.E. Sheptycki, “Political Culture and Structures of Social Control: Police Related Scandal in Low Countries in Comparative Perspective” (1999) 9:1 Policing and Society 1.
2. See Sheptycki, Policing and Society 3, especially the Introduction.
3. See also J. Sheptycki “Accountability Across the Policing Field: Towards a General Cartography of Accountability for Post-Modern Policing” (2002) 12:4 Policing and Society Special Issue on Police Accountability in Europe 323.
4. See M. Anderson, Policing the World; Interpol and the Politics of International Police Co-operation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989)
5. F. Bresler, Interpol (London: Mandarine, 1992)
6. M. Deflem, “Bureaucratization and Social Control: Historical Foundations of International Police Cooperation” (2000) 34:3 Law & Soc'y Rev. 601
7. M. Deflem, “The Logic of Nazification: The Case of the International Criminal Police Commission (“Interpol”)” (2002) 43:1 International Journal of Comparative Sociology 21
8. M. Deflem, Policing World Society; Historical Foundations of International Police Co-operation (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002)
9. M. Fooner, Interpol; Issues In World Crime and International Criminal Justice (New York: Plenum Press, 1989)
10. J.W.E. Sheptycki, “Transnational Policing and the Makings of a Postmodern State” (1995) 35:4 Brit. J. Crim. 613. As good as this work is, none of it can claim to illuminate in any detail how Interpol actually functions on a day-to-day basis. Unlike most of the important democratic police agencies in the West, no researcher has ever actually studied its working methods at first hand. This is a call for the kind of field study perhaps best exemplified by the pioneering work of Michael Banton and William Westley. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the first step on the road to democratic accountability for Interpol would be just the sort of research access that Banton and Westley obtained in their studies of municipal police departments in the United Kingdom and the United States almost forty years ago.
11. See M. Banton The Policeman in the Community (London: Tavistock, 1964) and
12. W. Westley, Violence and the Police: A Sociological Study of Law, Custom, and Morality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970).
13. P. Reuter, Legal Problems concerning the ICPO-INTERPOL Constitution: Preliminary Observations (undated) [unpublished legal opinion, English Translation, archived at Interpol]. Professor Reuter's legal opinion states, in part, that Interpol could “apparently be rightly called an international intergovernmental organisation, and indeed has been recognised as such by the United Nations Secretary General after some degree of understandable hesitation” (manuscript at 1–2). He states further that, while it is true that nearly all IGOs have been set up thorough formal treaties, under the principles of international law “it is even possible to conceive of an intergovernmental organisation being set up without a single written instrument, merely as the result of a series of precedents created by governments,” Violence and the Police: A Sociological Study of Law, Custom, and Morality, at 3–4. Professor Reuter conceded that this was not a complete answer to the question of Interpol's status because it did not consider the terms of constitutional law in all of the (very numerous) participating countries. However, his view was that, because the various parties to the Interpol organisation had “been applying its provisions for many years without ever having claimed that their commitment there under was unconstitutional” and because Interpol was “a centre of voluntary co- operation, exercising no powers which would conflict with national sovereignty” it would therefore “ill become a State to claim after so many years of successful activity that its commitment was unconstitutional and therefore invalid,” Violence and the Police: A Sociological Study of Law, Custom, and Morality, at 5–6. Were such questions to be raised, it “would be more legal and more seemly for it [the objecting state] to withdraw from the agreement,” Violence and the Police: A Sociological Study of Law, Custom, and Morality, at 6. Professor Reuter drew his legal opinion to a close by asking if there would be any benefit to raising Interpol's status to that of a fully- fledged and bona fide UN Specialised Agency. His answer was that, although the organisation might accrue a greater measure of prestige as a result, this had to be weighed against the loss of independence that this would bring since any such agreement would require full co-ordination with the administrative practices of the United Nations. He averred that participating States “would probably not adopt a unanimous position on such a transformation,” Violence and the Police: A Sociological Study of Law, Custom, and Morality, at 19.
14. Quoted in C. Valleix, “Interpol” (1984) 3 R.G.D.I.P. 90 reprinted in (1985) International Criminal Police Review 97.
15. Anderson et al, R.G.D.I.P 3 at 52.
16. It might do to note that the efficiency and effectiveness of the CNIL in securing privacy and civil liberties interests of French citizens has also been criticised. See C Raab, “Police Co-operation; the prospects for privacy” in M. Anderson & M den Boer, eds. Policing Across National Boundaries (London. Pinter 1994) As of this writing there is an internal debate within Interpol regarding the Rules relating to the processing of policing information and it is expected that new common security rules for Interpol's information system will be adopted in 2003.
17. See J.W.E. Sheptycki, “Policing, Postmodernism and Transnationalisation” (1998) 38:3 Brit. J. Crim. 485 at 497.
18. See C. Joubert & H. Bevers Schengen Investigated (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1996) at 29–31, 489–92. They are especially concerned to examine the extent to which such transnational police communications can be adequately governed by legal principles.
19. See also D. Bigo, “Liaison officers in Europe; new officers in the European Security Field” in J. Sheptycki, ed. Issues in Transnational Policing (London: Routledge 2000). Bigo argues that transnational liaison officers are substantially unaffected by frameworks of legal accountability.
20. See J. Benyon, et al. Police Co-operation in Europe; An Investigation (University of Leicester: Centre for the Study of Public Order, 1993)
21. J.W.E. Sheptycki, In Search of Transnational Policing (Aldershot: Avebury, 2002).
22. See M. den Boer, ed, (2002) 12:4 Policing and Society: Special Issue on Policing Accountability in Europe 243 for a wide-ranging debate on these issues
23. C. Fijnaut, The Intemationalisation of Police Co-operation in Western Europe (Kluwer Law and Taxation Publishers: Deventer and Boston, 1993) at 10–12.
24. See the Statewatch Observatory at http://www.statewatch.org/observatory2.htm for comprehensive analysis of these issues post 9–11. It is worth noting that the European Arrest Warrant also abolished the concepts of ‘dual criminality’ and ‘double jeopardy'. Indeed, the Eurowarrant does not even include a habeas corpus safeguard, prompting Sir Neil MacCormick, a Scottish Nationalist Member of the European Parliament and Professor of Public Law at Edinburgh University, to observe that policy makers in the EU had muddied the waters by equating allegations with hard proof. “They seem to think that prosecutors never make mistakes. Well they do. It's most urgent that we have remedies to prevent abuses of power.” Ambros Evans-Pritchard “EU gets a new arrest warrant but safeguard is blocked” The Daily Telegraph (7 February 2002). The European Arrest Warrant will come into full force in 2004, without the mechanism of the writ of habeas corpus.