In my last post, I pointed out that one lesson of Bill Browder's arrest in Spain last month is that the little-known system of Interpol alerts known as "diffusions" is badly in need of reform. But it’s not just the diffusion system that needs reform. We badly need a way to protect Americans — and others — from the abusive use of the Interpol system. My latest paper on Interpol proposes creating a “white list” of victims of abuse. Browder is certainly one such victim.

Another, sadly, is a British housewife (whose name I will not include here, lest I make her situation even worse) who was recently named in a Red Notice thanks to a bungle by Britain’s National Crime Agency. This unfortunate woman, who is entirely innocent, is now likely to have arrest warrants naming her in national databases around the world, in just the same way as Browder does. She would be well advised to avoid taking any holidays in Spain (or indeed anywhere in Europe) for the rest of her life. Being included on a “white list” would at least make her dilemma (and that of many others) a bit easier.

The reaction to Browder’s latest arrest has been impressive. A cross-party group of MPs has called on the British government to demand Russia be suspended from Interpol. Newspapers in the U.S. have backed this demand, and a flurry of British papers have reported on Russia’s abuse of Interpol at length. As this implies, if Interpol — and its democratic member nations — don’t support some meaningful reforms, the abuses will continue, and they sooner or later will be confronted by demands at the level of Congress, the House of Commons, or other national legislatures that will seriously crimp its style.

But right now, that is not the approach Interpol is emphasizing. Yes, there have been some reforms to parts of Interpol, but in the main, Interpol continues to blaze ahead with new initiatives before it has ended the abuse of the old ones. It is now evaluating software that will allow matches to be made against a shared, and Interpol maintained, database of voice samples.

The abusive potential of such a system of voice samples is enormous . True, it is supposedly limited to “lawfully intercepted” voices, but that is a meaningless condition in nations like Russia, China, and many others. It will be all too easy for China, for example, to stuff the database full of open source voice samples from every dissident who has found refuge in the U.S., Canada, or Australia, and so to stigmatize them as criminals or terrorists. Interpol already maintains databases of fingerprints and DNA samples, but while these can be abused, it takes a lot of effort to get someone’s fingerprints or DNA. In the age of YouTube, cell phones, and Facebook, it is far easier for an authoritarian government to get a voice sample – and to use it to abuse the Interpol system.

Of course, Russia and China are far from the only abusive nations. Numerically, Turkey has probably taken the lead as the nation that tries the hardest to abuse the system. In a remarkable statement in late May, the Turkish Justice and Interior Ministries announced that, after they requested Red Notices on a reported – and remarkable – 60,000 people for their purported membership of the Gulenist Terror Group, “the Interpol General Secretariat removed [our] passport cancellations and our authority to add new data to the database. The main reason for the ineffective use of Interpol channels is that Interpol insists on denying the bloody actions of the . . . armed terrorist organization as an act of terrorism.”

This substantiates an analysis I posted last July, and confirms that Turkey is not only trying to abuse the Interpol Red Notice system, but is avowedly using the Interpol database of lost and stolen passports as an instrument of harassment.

Interpol has gone out of its way to avoid acknowledging that it has blocked the Turkish requests. This was a commendable and correct action on Interpol’s part, but the deterrent value of this action has been weakened by Interpol’s refusal to own what it has done. We will not be able to reduce authoritarian abuse of Interpol without creating a deterrent – in the form of suspensions or expulsions – to abusive behavior. Turkey’s misuse of the Interpol system offered an opportunity to start to build such a deterrent.

Unfortunately, Interpol prioritizes not embarrassing its member nations over deterring them. And as long as Interpol is viewed as a kind of Hollywood international police agency – and coming in 2020 is “Red Notice,” staring The Rock and Gal Gadot, a movie that is unlikely to foster an accurate understanding of what Interpol actually does – there will be too little awareness of the fundamentally administrative reforms needed to prevent authoritarians from abusing it.