Interpol

Interpol stands for the International Criminal Police Organization. Interpol facilitates cross-border police cooperation and assists all organizations, authorities, and services with a mission to prevent or combat international crime.

After the United Nations (UN), Interpol is the largest intergovernmental organization with 187 member countries. In 2008, 562 law enforcement officers from 82 countries worked together in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish at the headquarters in France, and seven regional offices located in Argentina, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast, El Salvador, Kenya, Thailand, and Zimbabwe. Interpol also has special representatives at the UN in New York and the European Union in Brussels. Each Interpol member country maintains a National Central Bureau (NCB) staffed by national law enforcement officers.

Interpol was originally established in 1923 in Austria as the International Criminal Police Commission. In 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria and moved the commission's headquarters to Berlin in 1942. European allied officials of World War II from Belgium, France, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom revived the organization as the International Criminal Police Organization after the end of World War II in 1945 and shifted it to Paris. In 1989, the headquarters moved to its present location in Lyon, France.

The constitution of Interpol does not allow “any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious, or racial character.” This is to facilitate international police cooperation even where diplomatic relations do not exist among countries. Action is taken within the limits of the local laws of the respective countries and following the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

There are four core functions of Interpol. The first is to secure global police communications services by the I-24/7 system, which enables authorized law enforcement users to request, submit, and access vital police data instantly. The second function is operational data services and databases for police covering key data such as the names of suspected terrorists, child sexual abuse images, fingerprints, DNA profiles, stolen or lost identification and travel documents, and wanted persons. The third function is operational police support services in six priority crime areas: corruption, drugs and organized crime, financial and high-tech crime, fugitives, public safety and terrorism, and human trafficking. The last core function is police training and development for national police forces.