Movie stereotypes of Red Notices feature action heroes jetting in to arrest elusive criminals and while Red Notices do help capture serious offenders, the rest of the screen version is mostly fiction. The reality is more complex—and just as fascinating. Individuals subject to a Red Notice must be wanted for a serious extraditable crime. Sean McGovern is one of them. Once one of Ireland’s most wanted criminals, he is now awaiting sentencing by Dublin’s Special Criminal Court after pleading guilty to directing an organized crime group. McGovern’s conviction this March followed his extradition from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates in 2024. It’s an outcome that highlights the effectiveness of Red Notices and the close cooperation between INTERPOL and its member countries.
A Red Notice is a request to law enforcement agencies worldwide to locate and arrest a fugitive pending legal action such as extradition. Their history dates back to 1947, when INTERPOL issued the first ever Red Notice against a Russian national wanted for the murder of a policeman.
Although the notice for the location and arrest of Sean McGovern came almost eighty years and many thousands of Red Notices later, it was the first ever requested by the Republic of Ireland. “Like many of our member countries, Ireland wanted to fully understand the implications of requesting a Red Notice before proceeding -- in particular, that the decision to act on a Red Notice rests entirely with the jurisdiction where a fugitive is located” says Yaron Gottlieb, Director of INTERPOL’s Notices and Diffusions Taskforce (NDTF). “This meant Irish authorities were able to request the publication of the Red Notice in line with Irish law and without obligation to arrest people in the future,” he continues.
Strict compliance criteria
The fact that the decision to request or act on a Red Notice is the prerogative of each one of INTERPOL’s member countries is essential to the functioning of our flagship transnational law enforcement tool and the investigations, detentions and legal proceedings that may stem from it. So too is ensuring that every Red Notice issued complies with articles 2 and 3 of our Constitution and our Rules on the Processing of Data.
Respectively, these stipulate that INTERPOL must facilitate police cooperation “in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, forbid the organization to “undertake any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character” and specify that Red Notices must meet clear criteria on the type of crime committed (see below), the identification of the wanted individual and the nature of the judicial data it contains.
A dedicated taskforce
The responsibility for reviewing Notice requests against these criteria lies with INTERPOL’s NDTF, which is tasked with analyzing requests for Notices of all colours received from member countries via our secure communication system. Operational since 2016, the NDTF team includes lawyers, police officers and operational specialists. “Often leading to arrest and extradition, Red Notices are one of only a few INTERPOL tools that inherently combine both police and judicial work,” says Yaron Gottlieb, “so it is essential that our team has expertise in both areas.” Team members are also geographically diverse, with multi-lingual specialists who closely monitor geopolitics in different regions. “We know, for example,” he continues, “that a coup d’état or national elections in certain countries can be followed by requests for Red Notices to be issued against a fleeing former president or other political opponents.”
Robust processes against political interference
Although the vast majority of Red Notice requests meet INTERPOL’s rules, a small number of requests interpreted as targeting political opponents have led to accusations of INTERPOL being manipulated by authoritarian regimes. “We take such allegations very seriously,” says Yaron Gottlieb. “Indeed, the NDTF was in part created to counter the politically motivated requests that we have occasionally received, in particular following the digitization of the Notices system. We take all possible steps to ensure we only approve compliant requests,” he continues, “both through the diversity and expertise of our team and regular close engagement with member countries”. This includes providing training sessions on INTERPOL’s rules, in particular on Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution, for law enforcement and judicial authorities in member countries. It also includes continued monitoring of approved Red Notices after publication, as well as their cancellation in the event that new information showing them to be non-compliant becomes available “Of the many thousands of Red Notice requests that we review and authorize every year,” adds Yaron Gottlieb, “Our statistics show that only around 5% of the requests are non-compliant and most of those are unrelated to Article 2 and 3 issues”.
The non-political nature of Red Notices also concerns the specific type of offences they target, which must be serious ordinary law crimes that could qualify for extradition in all or at least most member countries. They must not involve political crimes such as treason, crimes involving culturally specific offences such as prostitution, or family matters like adultery. Murder, rape and fraud are all examples of the ordinary law crimes that may be cited in Red Notices, and murder brings us back to the case of Sean McGovern.
The fall of an organized crime kingpin
Now behind bars at Portlaoise maximum security prison in central Ireland, Sean McGovern is a senior member of the so-called Kinahan Cartel, reputed to be one of Europe’s most powerful transnational organized crime syndicates. Before his arrest, he was wanted for directing an organized crime group and for the murder of a man associated with the leader of a rival organized crime network in Dublin in 2016. Shortly after the shoot-out, he fled to Dubai, where he was known to be living along with several other Kinahan gang members. That was until October 2024, when McGovern was detained by police Dubai police shortly after the publication of a Red Notice against him at the request of INTERPOL’s National Central Bureau in the Republic of Ireland, on behalf of the country’s judicial authorities.
Two years of transnational coordination
The first steps towards what became known as Operation Harvest were taken at an informal meeting between officers from INTERPOL, the Dubai Police and the Garda Síochána (Irish police). “The aim was to explore how the two police forces could best work together to secure Sean McGovern’s arrest in full respect of the specific requirements of their two countries’ different legal systems,” says Rory Corcoran, Coordinator of INTERPOL’s financial crime team and a former Garda officer. ”As it recognizes Red Notices, the United Arab Emirates would be unable to make the arrest without one, while Ireland needed to ensure Red Notices were compliant with their own legal requirements."
Ireland’s first Red Notice
After almost two years of high-level exchanges in Dubai, at INTERPOL headquarters in Lyon, France, and in Dublin, the discussions culminated in a meeting at Garda Síochána headquarters in the Irish capital, attended by the Garda Commissioner and his legal advisers, along with senior staff from INTERPOL. “We were able to sit down with the Commissioner’s legal adviser and confirm the full legal framework around Red Notices. Following that meeting, Operation Harvest began,” says Yaron Gottlieb.
By this time, McGovern had been the subject of a Blue Notice – a request to collect additional information about a person’s identity, location or activities in relation to a criminal investigation – for several years. He was known to be in Dubai, where police were in close contact with INTERPOL and arrested him within an hour of publication of the Red Notice on 10 October 2024.
A shock wave for organized crime
Six months on, McGovern was extradited to Dublin. Now, almost a year after that, he is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to directing the activities of a criminal organization in connection with the murder and surveillance of rival gang members. “McGovern’s arrest and extradition were a significant development in disrupting the Kinahan Organised Crime Gang,” says Justin Kelly, Commissioner of An Garda Síochána. “It shows how powerful the combination of international police collaboration and a tool like the INTERPOL Red Notice can be in tackling transnational organised crime.”