Turkey has used INTERPOL mechanisms on a massive scale to pursue journalists living in exile and political opponents through filings of Red Notice requests and alerts on a global database of travel documents, according to an investigation that cites internal INTERPOL records.
According to the report on investigative news website Disclose, INTERPOL deleted close to 74,000 Turkish passport and travel document entries from its Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database between 2016 and 2021 at the height of Ankara’s crackdown on non-loyalist citizens that followed a failed coup. Disclose said Turkey later managed to add 560 more entries in 2023 and that INTERPOL deemed all of them problematic.
The investigation also said INTERPOL had rejected 773 Red Notice requests over five years because they were political in nature.
The people targeted were accused of links to the Gülen movement, inspired by Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen who lived in exile in the United States until his death in October 2024. The group is renowned worldwide for its contributions to education, social welfare and interfaith dialogue. The Turkish government, however, accuses the movement of orchestrating the failed coup on July 15, 2016, a charge the movement strongly denies.
Red Notices are filings circulated through INTERPOL asking police worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition or similar legal action. INTERPOL’s rules bar the organization from activities of a political, military, religious or racial character, a restriction often referred to as Article 3.
The Disclose investigation recounted individual cases where Turkey’s requests led to detentions abroad.
One case involved Akın Olgun, a journalist who sought refuge in the United Kingdom and later obtained British citizenship. Disclose said Olgun’s problems began with a social media post in March 2021 about spotting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak, a former finance minister, in London. Olgun was detained by Greek police at Rhodes airport on October 13, 2022, after authorities treated him as a terrorism suspect because his name appeared in an INTERPOL wanted-persons system. Disclose said he spent more than a month in prison and later had the notice removed in 2024.
Disclose also described the case of Yaser Örnek, who it said was targeted with a Red Notice in 2019 over alleged links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey and its Western allies. Örnek received refugee status in 2020 but was detained during a police stop in Bavaria in July 2022 and held for 12 days before the notice was removed.
Turkey has also tried to use INTERPOL’s Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database as a parallel pressure tool by feeding in information from cancelled passports, a move that can trigger stops at borders because customs and immigration agencies check the database.
Statewatch, a UK-based civil liberties group, has reported similar concerns, arguing that misuse of the travel-document database can function as a workaround when red notices are blocked or screened out.
The Stockholm Center for Freedom, which has tracked Turkey’s use of INTERPOL channels for years, reported in 2021 that a senior Turkish Interior Ministry official told lawmakers that INTERPOL had refused 773 Turkish Red Notice requests tied to Gülen movement allegations after finding them political. The outlet said Turkey’s deputy foreign minister at the time also complained to parliament that INTERPOL had deleted Turkish entries in the Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database after Turkey began canceling tens of thousands of passports.
According to internal records seen by Disclose, INTERPOL responded to the scale of Turkey-linked misuse by imposing “corrective measures” on Turkey in 2021, placing Ankara’s use of Red Notices and internal message systems under enhanced monitoring. These measures, however, were lifted less than three years later.
A memo dated January 2025 cited in the report cast doubt on whether the underlying problems had been solved, quoting the corrective measures team as saying that “requests from Ankara continue to pose challenges” and that Turkey’s “non-compliance percentage remains higher than for most countries.”
The report comes as broader investigations and legal commentary have focused on how authoritarian governments use international policing tools to project pressure beyond their borders.
In 2023 the legal analysis site Just Security published a piece by Brussels-based lawyer Ali Yıldız and British lawyer Ben Keith describing how Turkey, after increased scrutiny of its requests of Red Notices, shifted toward other INTERPOL mechanisms including travel-document alerts, raising concerns about due process for people stopped at borders.
The same year, Red Notice Monitor published an open letter to INTERPOL’s secretary general in which the Arrested Lawyers Initiative argued that the travel-document database lacked an equivalent screening mechanism to the one used for notices and warned that Turkey’s misuse remained an ongoing problem.
Disclose also pointed to what it described as tactical workarounds in Turkey’s INTERPOL approach.
Nordic Monitor, a Sweden-based outlet run by Turkish journalists living in exile, reported in 2025 on a memo it said showed Turkish officials discussing how to present requests in ways more likely to pass INTERPOL screening, including by substituting ordinary-crime allegations for politically sensitive ones.
For those targeted by authoritarian governments, the practical risk is immediate. A Red Notice or travel-document alert can surface during a border crossing, a traffic stop or a routine police check, potentially leading to detention while authorities verify the underlying request. It can also complicate residency, banking and travel even when no extradition follows.
According to the Red Notice Monitor, since the 2016 coup attempt, Turkish authorities have submitted more than 3,500 Red Notice and diffusion requests aimed at alleged Gülen movement members.
Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, since the corruption investigations of December 17-25, 2013, which implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan, his family members and his inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan began to target the group.
Erdoğan’s government labeled the group as a “terrorist organization” in May 2016, before the failed coup took place, a designation not recognized by other governments and major international bodies, including the United States and the European Union.
Erdoğan intensified the crackdown on the movement following the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, that he accused Gülen of masterminding. The movement strongly denies involvement in the abortive putsch or any terrorist activity.
The movement’s followers, also known as Hizmet (Service) supporters, say they have been unfairly targeted in a campaign of political persecution aimed at silencing dissent and consolidating power. The post-coup purge has seen hundreds of thousands investigated and tens of thousands imprisoned on terrorism-related charges widely viewed as politically motivated.
According to the latest figures from the Justice Ministry, more than 126,000 people have been convicted of alleged links to the movement since 2016, with 11,085 still in prison.
In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.