International notices: what a business owner should know in advance

An international notice circulated between police forces is not an arrest warrant and is not nothing. For anyone with a business exposed to a jurisdiction where legal processes can be used commercially, it belongs in a plan rather than in a crisis.

What it is

• A request from one country's authorities, circulated to others, to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition.
• It is not a judicial decision of the receiving countries, and each decides for itself whether to act.
• Other categories of notice exist for information and for missing persons, and they are frequently confused with each other in reporting.

How it is misused

The organisation's rules prohibit notices that are political, military, religious or racial in character, and it has a review mechanism precisely because member states have used the system in commercial and political disputes. Notices have been deleted on review, and the mechanism is real — it is also slow.

What it does in practice

• Border stops and detention in states that act on notices, pending a decision.
• Visa refusals, because the check runs on application.
• Bank account closures, since screening includes these lists.
• Refusal of residence and citizenship applications, on character grounds, whatever the merits.

What can be done

• Establish whether one exists. There is a formal access request procedure; a lawyer specialising in this makes it.
• Apply to the review body for deletion, with evidence of the political or commercial character of the underlying case. This is specialist work with a documented success rate.
• Obtain protection in a jurisdiction that will not extradite, where the case warrants it.
• Do it before travelling rather than after a detention, which is the difference between a legal process and a legal process conducted from custody in a third country.

The preventive note

For someone whose business has exposure to a jurisdiction where this happens, the planning is ordinary: know the status, hold a second nationality of a state that does not extradite to it where appropriate, and keep the residence and banking arrangements outside the reach of the dispute. All of it is easier before there is a case than after.