He lost a job offer because of a Green Notice that, it turned out, contained real errors: a wrong nationality, an incorrect account of his deportation, a wrong conviction date, and information the requesting bureau had not properly sourced from the country it came from. The bureau checked, corrected the record and reissued the notice — and the corrected version survived review.
A revision request that actually met the threshold
Unlike many revision requests in this catalogue, this one succeeded at the first hurdle. He argued the Green Notice contained inaccurate information and that some of it, said to concern other countries, had never actually been verified with those countries before being circulated through INTERPOL’s channels. The Commission found this could genuinely have led to a different conclusion had it been known earlier, and agreed to examine the substance.
What checking the file actually turned up
The bureau did not simply defend the existing notice — it investigated the specific complaints and confirmed several of them were correct:
- His nationality had been recorded wrongly.
- The wording describing his deportation was inaccurate and needed to be corrected.
- A conviction date was wrong.
- The information said to originate from another country had not, in fact, been confirmed with that country before circulation — the bureau then contacted it directly to obtain a copy of his convictions.
Rather than issuing a correction notice, the bureau deleted the earlier Green Notice entirely and issued a new one, later updating that new notice’s summary of facts once the outstanding verification was complete. It also confirmed he remained on the sex offenders register underlying the warning, and offered to provide him copies of both the original and the corrected notice.
Why the corrected notice still complied
Having established genuine errors, the question became whether what remained — the corrected notice — met the criteria for a Green Notice under Article 89 of the RPD. The Commission found that it did: the bureau had verified the information with the country actually holding the relevant conviction, updated the file accordingly, and confirmed the underlying basis for the warning — his continued registration as a sex offender — remained accurate. Revision, having established real inaccuracies, did not lead to a different conclusion once those inaccuracies had been fixed.
What this means for an accuracy complaint
This decision is useful because it shows both halves of a successful accuracy challenge and its natural limit. Genuine, specific errors — nationality, dates, an unverified source country — are exactly the kind of concrete fact that clears the revision threshold and that a bureau can be made to check. But correcting them does not automatically mean the notice disappears: if the corrected version still satisfies the underlying legal test, as it did here, the notice survives in its corrected form. An accuracy complaint is a tool for fixing a file, not necessarily for deleting it.
What made this bureau’s response effective
Compare this bureau’s conduct with others in this catalogue that simply repeated the notice’s original wording when challenged. Here, each specific complaint was checked against a source and either confirmed or resolved: identity records were reverified, the deportation account was corrected, the conviction date was fixed, and — critically — the bureau went back to the country actually holding the conviction rather than relying on secondhand information. That sequence of verification is what let the corrected notice survive scrutiny rather than being deleted outright.
For an applicant, the practical takeaway is to frame an accuracy complaint as a list of specific, checkable facts rather than a general objection to the notice’s existence. A bureau faced with five named errors has to either verify or correct each one; a bureau faced with a broad complaint that the notice is “unfair” or “outdated” has much more room to give a general, unhelpful answer.
Decision extract published by INTERPOL · catalogue reference ccf-2017-11 · 2017 · Green Notice · data maintained. Read the full extract (PDF). Source: interpol.int. Names, countries and dates are redacted in the published extract.
If your Green Notice contains details you know to be wrong, identify each error precisely — a date, a nationality, a source that was never verified — rather than arguing the notice as a whole is unfair. List the specific errors you have found and we will tell you which ones are worth pursuing.
Correcting errors in a Green Notice
If I find factual errors in my Green Notice, will it be deleted?
Not necessarily. A bureau that verifies and corrects genuine errors — even significant ones — can issue a corrected notice that still meets the legal requirements, in which case the warning itself survives.
Does information about me from another country need to be verified before it is used?
It should be. Where information said to originate from another country had not actually been confirmed with that country, the Commission treated this as a real accuracy problem requiring the bureau to go back and check.
What counts as a strong accuracy complaint?
Specific, checkable errors: a wrong date, a wrong nationality, a mischaracterised event. General complaints that a notice is unfair or outdated carry far less weight than a list of concrete factual mistakes.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For advice specific to your situation, please consult a qualified lawyer.