When INTERPOL Notices Overlap: Joint CCF Review

An INTERPOL case does not always involve one person, one Notice and one legal issue.

In cross-border family disputes, the same sequence of events may generate several entries in INTERPOL’s Information System at the same time. A parent may become the subject of a Red or Blue Notice, while a child is simultaneously recorded under a Yellow Notice. Looked at separately, the entries appear to serve very different purposes: one concerns criminal proceedings against an adult; the other concerns the location of a child.

That formal distinction is important. But it is not always the whole picture.

There are cases in which the legality and continuing purpose of one Notice cannot properly be understood without examining the other. The criminal allegation against the parent may arise directly from a custody dispute, the removal of a child, the registration of the child’s identity, or competing parental claims. At the same time, the Yellow Notice may continue to describe the child as “missing” even though the child’s location and circumstances are already known.

In such cases, the question for the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files (“CCF”) is not simply whether each Notice can survive an isolated technical review. The more important question may be whether the Notices remain compliant with INTERPOL’s rules when the underlying facts are examined as a whole.

Joint examination is expressly recognised by the CCF rules

The procedural basis is straightforward.

Rule 26 of the Operating Rules of the CCF provides that the Requests Chamber may, either at the applicants’ request or on its own initiative, process together requests that relate to the same case or raise the same or similar issues. The current Operating Rules were amended in March 2026, and Rule 26 remains an express procedural mechanism for joint examination.

This is no longer merely a provision hidden in the procedural rules. The CCF’s new online Portal contains a specific “Link” function. INTERPOL’s own guidance gives, as an example of linked requests, applications concerning members of the same family, including a parent and a child. The guidance also makes an important procedural point: where more than one individual is concerned, separate requests still have to be submitted. They may be linked, but they do not become a single application.

That distinction matters.

Joint examination does not erase the separate legal tests governing different Notices. A Red Notice must satisfy the requirements applicable to Red Notices. A Yellow Notice must independently have a valid locating purpose. A Blue Notice is assessed according to a different function again. What Rule 26 permits is something more subtle: the Commission may examine those separate legal questions against the same factual background rather than artificially separating events that are, in reality, interconnected.

Why the relationship between the Notices can matter

A Red Notice is designed to seek the location of a wanted person and his or her detention, arrest or restriction of movement for extradition, surrender or similar lawful action. Under Article 83 of the Rules on the Processing of Data (“RPD”), the underlying offence must, as a rule, constitute a serious ordinary-law crime. The same provision expressly identifies offences relating to family or private matters, as well as certain matters arising from administrative rules or private disputes, as categories for which Red Notices may not ordinarily be published.

A Yellow Notice has a fundamentally different function. Article 90 RPD provides for its use to locate a missing person or identify a person who cannot identify himself or herself. Crucially, where the Notice concerns a missing person, the person’s whereabouts must be unknown to the police.

These provisions can interact in a parental dispute.

Imagine a parent accused of unlawfully removing a child. The criminal case may produce a Red Notice against the parent, while the child becomes the subject of a Yellow Notice. If the child is later found living openly with that parent, national authorities know the child’s precise whereabouts, and courts in another jurisdiction recognise that parent’s custodial position, those facts are relevant to the Yellow Notice for an obvious reason: the child may no longer be “missing”.

But those same facts may also illuminate the nature of the criminal case underlying the Red Notice. What initially appears to be an ordinary international criminal case may, on closer examination, be inseparable from competing custody proceedings or another private family dispute.

The point is not that one Notice automatically invalidates another. It does not. The point is that the factual record created by one part of the case may be highly relevant to the legal assessment of the other.

INTERPOL’s own RPD recognise this type of interdependence. Article 81 addresses circumstances in which a Notice is linked to one or more other cooperation requests or alerts whose purpose has been achieved and without which the Notice cannot be maintained. In such circumstances, the Rules contemplate withdrawal or cancellation.

Decision 2017-16: being away from one parent does not necessarily mean being “missing”

One of the clearest early examples is CCF Decision 2017-16.

The case concerned a parent accused of parental abduction and children who were the subjects of Yellow Notices. There were conflicting custody decisions from different jurisdictions. The Commission emphasised that INTERPOL was generally not the appropriate forum for resolving disputes created by competing national custody judgments.

The Commission then considered the Yellow Notices separately. The relevant authorities knew where the children were. The requesting side argued, in substance, that the children should nevertheless continue to be considered missing because they were not in the custody of the parent claiming guardianship.

The CCF rejected that approach. Knowledge of the children’s location was decisive. The fact that the children were not with the parent seeking their return was not, by itself, enough to treat them as unfound. The Commission considered that the locating purpose of the Yellow Notices had been achieved.

This distinction remains particularly important in practice. A Yellow Notice is an international locating mechanism. It is not, in itself, a mechanism for enforcing one parent’s view of custody after the child has been located.

Decision 2025-01: Red and Yellow Notices examined as one factual situation

Decision 2025-01 makes the procedural point even more clearly.

The case involved a Red Notice against a parent and Yellow Notices concerning his children. The Commission expressly recorded that the circumstances called for a joint study of the two requests.

The underlying dispute involved custody decisions in two jurisdictions. Both parents had participated, at different stages, in national proceedings, and the courts had reached conflicting conclusions concerning custody.

When examining the Red Notice, the CCF found that the case derived from a family dispute of the kind relevant under Article 83(1)(a)(i) RPD. It concluded that continued retention of the Red Notice was incompatible with that provision.

The Commission then considered the Yellow Notices. It found that the children’s whereabouts and circumstances were known to the relevant authorities and that there was no sufficient factual basis for continuing to regard them as missing. The Yellow Notices therefore lacked the required purpose under Article 90. The Commission ultimately decided that the data concerning all applicants were non-compliant and should be deleted.

The importance of this decision goes beyond parental-abduction cases. It demonstrates why linked review can be valuable. The Commission did not collapse the Red and Yellow Notice tests into one. It applied separate rules to each. But it assessed both against the same evidential landscape.

That is often the correct way to approach an interconnected INTERPOL matter.

Joint examination does not mean that linked Notices must be deleted

Decision 2024-01 is an equally useful counterexample.

There, a parent was the subject of a Blue Notice and the child was the subject of a Yellow Notice. Both arose from allegations connected with the parent taking the child. The CCF considered the related issues together but ultimately found the data compliant.

The difference was factual and legal.

The authorities did not know the child’s precise location; they knew only that the child was believed to be somewhere in another country. The Commission therefore considered that the Yellow Notice retained a genuine locating purpose. At the same time, the Blue Notice was directed not at arrest for extradition but at locating the parent and obtaining information in an ongoing criminal investigation. The Commission noted the different evidential and functional requirements applicable to a Blue Notice and concluded that both Notices still served valid purposes.

This decision is important because it prevents an overly simplistic conclusion.

A family background does not automatically make every INTERPOL entry unlawful. Nor does linking a parent’s request with a child’s request create a presumption in favour of deletion. The outcome still depends upon the precise function of each Notice, the information available to the authorities, the status of national proceedings and the continuing international-police purpose of the data.

That is precisely why joint examination can be useful: it improves the quality of the analysis without predetermining the result.

A case from my practice: a Red Notice for the mother and a Yellow Notice for the child

A recent matter from my own practice illustrates a less conventional version of the same problem.

The case did not begin with an allegation formally described as parental abduction.

A mother had obtained a birth certificate for her child through the consular authorities of her own country while living abroad. The certificate did not record the alleged father in the manner later asserted by him, and the child bore the mother’s surname. A court in the requesting country subsequently convicted the mother in absentia of document-related offences arising from the issuance and use of that birth certificate. That judgment became the basis for a Red Notice.

The Red Notice challenge therefore raised issues which, on their face, looked very different from a conventional custody case. They included the legal nature of the consular civil-registration procedure, the description of the alleged criminal conduct, the relationship between the document offence and the underlying parental disagreement, and procedural issues surrounding the judgment rendered in the mother’s absence.

But there was a second INTERPOL entry.

The child had also been made the subject of a Yellow Notice as a missing person. The same national judgment recorded that the child had left the requesting country together with her mother. By the time the Yellow Notice challenge was brought, the child was living openly with her mother in another country, her residence was registered with the competent authorities, and her whereabouts were known. Proceedings brought by the alleged father in the child’s country of residence to establish paternity had subsequently been withdrawn.

Viewed separately, the Red Notice concerned alleged document forgery and the Yellow Notice concerned a supposedly missing child.

Viewed together, however, they arose from the same underlying sequence of events: a disagreement over the child’s identity and parental status, the issuance of national identity documents, the mother’s departure with the child, subsequent proceedings initiated in the requesting country and the use of INTERPOL mechanisms against both mother and child.

For that reason, I submitted the Yellow Notice request with an express request under Rule 26 that it be examined jointly with the already pending Red Notice challenge. The submission explained that both Notices arose from the same factual circumstances and national proceedings, and that the assessment of the factual basis and continuing purpose of one was directly relevant to the assessment of the other.

The strategic value of this approach is not that the Yellow Notice simply becomes another argument against the Red Notice, or vice versa.

It is that the Commission is invited to see the entire factual architecture of the case.

For the Yellow Notice, the central question is whether an international mechanism for locating a missing child can continue to serve its Article 90 purpose once the child’s location and circumstances are known.

For the Red Notice, a different set of rules applies. But the existence and history of the Yellow Notice may help explain the actual origin of the criminal proceedings, the role of the parental dispute, and the relationship between the alleged document offence and the controversy over the child.

The two legal tests remain distinct. The facts do not.

Because the matter is one in which requests have been submitted to the CCF, it would be inappropriate to suggest that joint examination itself determines the eventual outcome. It does not. What the example demonstrates is a method of presenting an interconnected case in a way that reflects the reality of the dispute rather than the formal colour assigned to each INTERPOL entry.

The practical mistake of challenging each Notice in isolation

There is a natural tendency in INTERPOL work to begin with the colour of the Notice.

For a Red Notice, counsel turns to Article 83, extradition, the arrest warrant, seriousness, the description of criminal activity and Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution. For a Yellow Notice, the analysis moves immediately to Article 90 and whether the person is genuinely missing. For a Blue Notice, Article 88 and the needs of the ongoing investigation become central.

That is legally necessary, but it should not dictate the entire strategy.

Where several Notices arise from one sequence of events, the first question should be factual: what connects them?

The answer may lie in the same complainant, the same national proceedings, the same custody judgment, the same alleged removal of a child, the same disputed identity document or the same assertion that a person cannot be found.

Only then should the legal analysis divide into the separate tests applicable to each Notice.

This matters particularly because evidence prepared for one request can expose a problem in another. Proof that authorities know precisely where a child resides is directly relevant to Article 90. But it may also show that the true dispute is no longer about locating anyone at all. A foreign custody decision may be relevant to the child’s status while simultaneously demonstrating the existence of contradictory national proceedings. A criminal judgment may appear independent until its factual findings show that the alleged harm is defined entirely by one parent’s claimed rights against the other.

A good linked application therefore does not merely repeat identical submissions in two files. It identifies which facts perform different legal functions in each request.

Separate applications, coordinated evidence

There is another procedural point worth emphasising.

“Joint examination” should not be confused with submitting one request for several people. Under the current Portal procedure, each individual remains an applicant in his or her own right and a separate request is required. The Portal then allows related requests to be linked. Where the submitters differ, the CCF guidance warns that each request is treated independently and that arguments submitted in one request cannot simply be assumed to have been made in another.

For practitioners, this means that coordination has to be deliberate.

The requests should identify each other. The relevant common documents should be put before the Commission in the appropriate files. The chronology should be consistent. Most importantly, the legal submissions should explain not only that the cases are related, but why that relationship matters under the Rules.

Rule 26 gives the Commission the procedural power to examine the requests together. It does not relieve the applicant of demonstrating the legal relevance of doing so.

What joint review can reveal

The strongest linked cases tend to expose a mismatch between the formal description of the INTERPOL data and the reality shown by the wider factual record.

A child described as missing may in fact be residing at a fixed and officially known address. An allegation presented as an ordinary criminal offence may originate in competing parental claims. A request initially justified by the need to locate a person may remain in the system after the authorities have established where that person is. Conversely, a case that appears from the applicant’s account to be a purely private dispute may still involve a legitimate criminal investigation and a genuine need to locate the persons concerned.

Joint examination helps distinguish between these situations.

It also reflects a broader principle running through INTERPOL’s data-processing framework: information does not remain compliant simply because there was once a valid reason to record it. Purpose, relevance and accuracy have to continue to exist. The RPD require data sources to keep information accurate and relevant and contemplate cancellation where the purpose of a Notice has been achieved or the conditions for publication no longer exist.

That continuing-purpose analysis is particularly significant in family cases because the factual situation can change rapidly. A child who was genuinely unlocated at one stage may later be located. Custody proceedings may produce a new judgment. Authorities in another country may conduct welfare checks. Paternity or custody claims may be withdrawn. An investigation may change its legal character.

An INTERPOL entry cannot be assessed only by asking whether it may have had a basis on the day it was created.

Conclusion

The existence of several INTERPOL Notices arising from the same dispute should never be treated as a purely administrative coincidence.

In the right case, the relationship between them is part of the legal analysis itself.

Rule 26 gives the CCF an express mechanism for examining related requests together. Decisions 2017-16 and 2025-01 demonstrate how Red and Yellow Notices concerning parents and children can require an integrated understanding of family proceedings, custody decisions and the actual whereabouts of the children. Decision 2024-01 shows the other side of the principle: linked review does not mean automatic deletion, and Notices will remain where their individual purposes and conditions continue to be satisfied.

For counsel, the important question is therefore not simply: Which Notice is being challenged?

It is also: What other INTERPOL data arise from the same events, and what do those data reveal about the real nature and continuing purpose of the case?

Sometimes the strongest argument against an INTERPOL Notice becomes visible only when another Notice is placed beside it.

This article provides general information only and does not constitute legal advice. The practical example is anonymised. References to pending CCF requests do not predict or imply any particular outcome.