Who will police Interpol?
The election of a worrying new president is just the latest thing to go wrong
MATTHEW HEDGES, a British doctoral student, says he spent nearly seven months mostly in solitary confinement in a prison in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). He tells of being drugged, interrogated, blindfolded and forced to stand all day in manacles. He falsely confessed to being a spy just to end the agony, he says. He was eventually pardoned and freed. To his horror, the man he accuses of complicity in his torture, Ahmed Naser al-Raisi, the inspector-general of the UAE interior ministry at the time, who was in charge of prisons, was neither sacked nor demoted. The UAE denies the claims and on November 25th Mr al-Raisi was elected Interpol’s new president.
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “Who will police Interpol?”
Leaders December 4th 2021
From the December 4th 2021 edition
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