A highly contested election. Emirati General Ahmed Nasser Al-Raisi, the target of several complaints of torture, was elected president of Interpol on Thursday, November 25, to the chagrin of human rights defenders. The function of president is essentially honorary, the real boss of the organization being its secretary general, the German Jürgen Stock, appointed for a second five-year term in 2019. However, the candidacy of the Emirati general, whose country has become in recent years the second largest contributor to the Interpol budget, had aroused the indignation of human rights organizations and European elected officials.
In October 2020, nineteen NGOs, including Human Rights Watch (HRW), were already worried about the possible choice of the Emirati general, “member of a security apparatus which systematically targets the peaceful opposition”. At the same time, several complaints of torture against Ahmed Nasser Al-Raisi, who joined the ranks of his country’s police force in 1980 and served in it for several decades, have been deposited in recent months in France, where the organization is based, and in Turkey, the host country of the General assembly.
In a thinly veiled reference to Ahmed Nasser Al-Raisi, Czech Sarka Havrankova, the only other candidate for Interpol’s presidency, reminded on Thursday morning on Twitter that the organization’s statutes implied “oppose arbitrary arrests and detentions and condemn torture”.
The United Arab Emirates donated 50 million euros to Interpol in 2017, an amount almost equivalent to the assessed contributions of the 195 member countries of the organization, which amounted to 60 million euros in 2020. The Emirates, which themselves hosted the Interpol General Assembly in 2018 and wanted to host it again in 2020, also “given or loaned 10 million euros in 2019, around 7% of Interpol’s annual budget“, emphasizes Edward Lemon, for whom such funding is a way to buy influence.