President Xi Jinping opens Interpol General Assembly with call for cooperation

The Interpol general assembly met this week in Beijing, China, bringing nearly 1,000 participants from 156 countries together at an event opened with a speech from Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“No country can guarantee its absolute security all by itself,” Xi said. “China stands ready to closely cooperate and collaborate with INTERPOL members and international organizations to take an active part in global security and make a new and greater contribution to peace and the development of mankind.”

The four-day meeting is covering a number of issues, including the idea of getting officers on the ground real-time access to global policing data. There is a growing call for a single platform to do so, rather than many applications scattered between organizations, especially given that, as Interpol Secretary General Jürgen Stock has noted, national policing resources are stretched as never before.

Stock pointed to results that have come from recent checks against Interpol’s databases. In the last two weeks alone, he said, such efforts had identified 185 child sexual abuse victims, identified 40 thieves, fraudsters and murders, detected a blank Syrian passport in Europe that had been stolen by terrorists and led to the arrests of more than 300 people in an Asia-Pacific drug trafficking operation.

“Security is a basic need for human survival, the common denominator of all countries,” Interpol President Meng Hongwei said. “The crimes we see are no longer what a country can solve alone. It is imperative that police help each other, because it is helping ourselves.”