Topics Covered: Security agencies, role and mandate.
What is a Blue Corner notice?
What to study?
For Prelims and mains: Composition, objectives and functions of Interpol, various notices.
Context: Interpol has issued a Blue Corner notice to help locate fugitive self-styled godman Nithyananda, weeks after the Gujarat Police sought the agency’s intervention for this. Nithyananda fled India last year amid allegations of rape and sexual abuse.
What is a Interpol notice?
Notices are international requests for cooperation or alerts allowing police in member countries to share critical crime-related information.
There are seven types of notices — Red Notice, Yellow Notice, Blue Notice, Black Notice, Green Notice, Orange Notice, and Purple Notice.
What is blue notice?
Issued to “collect additional information about a person’s identity, location or activities in relation to a crime.”
What is Interpol?
The International Criminal Police Organisation, or Interpol, is a 194-member intergovernmental organisation.
Headquartered in Lyon, France.
Formed in 1923 as the International Criminal Police Commission, and started calling itself Interpol in 1956.
Interpol’s declared global policing goals include countering terrorism, promoting border integrity worldwide, protection of vulnerable communities, providing a secure cyberspace for people and businesses, curbing illicit markets, supporting environment security, and promoting global integrity.
India joined the organisation in 1949.
What is the Interpol General Assembly?
It is Interpol’s supreme governing body, and comprises representatives from all its member countries.
It meets annually for a session lasting approximately four days, to vote on activities and policy.
Each country is represented by one or more delegates at the Assembly, who are typically chiefs of law enforcement agencies.
The Assembly also elects the members of the Interpol Executive Committee, the governing body which “provides guidance and direction in between sessions of the Assembly”.
Sources: Indian Express.
