The trouble with Interpol

At the last minute, the Russian police general everyone had assumed was a shoo-in to become the next head of Interpol was defeated by the acting head, South Korean Kim Jong-yang. It’s good news for the international police cooperation organisation, for the West and, arguably, for justice – but it’s not the end of the story. The presumed front-runner, major general Alexander Prokopchuk – formerly the head of Russia’s Interpol bureau – has been accused of supervising the systematic attempt to apparently use the agency to persecute the Kremlin’s political enemies.

Nonetheless, until the eleventh hour, everyone saw Prokopchuk as the heir apparent. Moscow certainly seems to have thought so. It has just opened another case against one of its bêtes noires, the financier Bill Browder. Having been the victim of a tax fraud at the hands of corrupt Russian officials, in the course of which his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was tortured and left do die without medical attention in prison, Browder is campaigning for the EU to introduce new laws sanctioning Russian human rights abusers.