CCF: Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files

The Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files is INTERPOL’s independent supervisory body, established under Article 36 of INTERPOL’s Constitution. It operates separately from INTERPOL’s General Secretariat, and its role is to make sure INTERPOL’s handling of personal data complies with the organization’s own rules — chiefly the Statute on the Processing of Data (SPD) and, historically, the Rules on the Processing of Data (RPD).

The CCF is not a court, and it does not rule on whether you’re guilty of the underlying allegation. What it does decide is narrower but still powerful: whether INTERPOL should be holding, processing, or circulating your data at all — including whether a notice violates Article 3 of the Constitution (the prohibition on political, military, religious, or racial motivation).

As of 10:00 CET on Thursday, 26 March 2026, the CCF launched a dedicated online portal, which is now the only accepted channel for submissions — email and postal filings are no longer accepted, except where the Commission finds exceptional circumstances under the CCF Operating Rules. On the same date, the CCF adopted a revised set of Operating Rules and published its first Portal User Guide for applicants.

Through the portal, applicants or their authorized legal representatives can:

Submissions are subject to practical format constraints — arguments are generally expected to fit within a defined page limit, with a capped number of supporting exhibits, and any audiovisual evidence must be transcribed into writing rather than submitted as media files.

A note on preemptive requests: Before the portal’s launch, INTERPOL’s public guidance described a mechanism allowing individuals to ask the CCF to flag or block future data — essentially, to get ahead of a Red Notice or Diffusion before it’s ever filed. Since the new portal launched, that guidance has been removed from the CCF’s public materials, and the portal’s own description focuses specifically on access, correction, deletion, and revision requests. It is currently unclear whether, or how, preemptive requests are being handled going forward. If your situation involves trying to act before a notice is published, this is exactly the kind of evolving procedural question where you need a lawyer actively monitoring CCF practice, not a static set of instructions. See our page on preventing a Red Notice before it’s issued for how we approach this uncertainty in practice.

Which of these applies to you depends entirely on your notice type and situation — a Red Notice case is usually a deletion request built around Article 3 or evidentiary grounds (see our Red Notice removal guide), while a Diffusion case follows a related but distinct process (see our Diffusion removal guide). If you’re not sure which notice type applies to your situation, our Interpol Lawyers in Dubai hub page breaks down all seven notice colors.

It’s tempting to think of this as paperwork you can handle yourself — fill in a form, attach your documents, wait for an answer. In practice, the CCF portal’s structure works against unrepresented applicants in ways that aren’t obvious until you’re already inside the process.

The format constraints are unforgiving. Arguments must fit within a strict page limit, with a capped number of exhibits. Applicants who aren’t used to legal drafting tend to either bury their strongest argument under too much background detail, or leave out the specific evidentiary link the CCF is actually looking for — the difference between “I believe this notice is political” and demonstrating, point by point, that a prosecution began within weeks of a specific protected activity, using dates, documents, and comparable cases.

The Commission doesn’t investigate on your behalf. It reviews what you submit. If your request doesn’t affirmatively prove your case — rather than simply asserting it — it fails, regardless of how legitimate your underlying situation is. This is the single most common reason self-filed requests are rejected: not because the person’s case was weak, but because the way it was presented didn’t meet the Commission’s evidentiary threshold.

Mistakes are costly to fix. A rejected or incomplete request doesn’t just delay you — it can also become part of the record the Commission considers if you file again later. Getting the first submission right matters more than most applicants realize going in.

You may be dealing with more than one authority at once. A CCF request rarely happens in isolation — there’s often a parallel need to manage UAE bank compliance, immigration status, or a pending court matter locally, while the CCF process runs its own timeline in Lyon. Coordinating both is difficult to do alone, particularly while under the stress of an active notice.

We recently worked with a client based in Dubai who discovered, through a routine bank compliance check, that an INTERPOL file referencing him existed — though he had never been arrested, charged, or notified of any proceeding by the requesting country. His first instinct, like most clients in this position, was to contact the foreign authorities directly to “clarify the misunderstanding.” We advised strongly against this: any direct contact can be read as an admission of awareness, and it hands the other side information they can use to strengthen their position before any formal request is even reviewed.

Instead, we filed an access request through the CCF to establish exactly what data existed and on what basis. Once we had that confirmation, we were able to build a deletion request around the specific procedural gaps in how the file had been created — rather than arguing in the abstract that “this isn’t fair.” The distinction mattered: a generic complaint about unfairness is exactly the kind of submission the Commission routinely rejects, while a request built on documented, specific evidentiary and procedural gaps is the kind that succeeds. The lesson generalizes well beyond this one case — precision, not urgency alone, is what moves a CCF request forward.

Facing an INTERPOL data issue is stressful precisely because so much of it happens outside your view — you rarely get advance notice, and by the time you find out, something (a frozen account, a stopped flight) has usually already happened. Contact our team for a confidential assessment of your situation and the right CCF request to pursue.