Yellow Notice: Data Correction and Removal After a Person Is Found

A Yellow Notice is intended to locate a missing person or identify a person unable to identify themselves. If a missing person has been found and competent authorities know the whereabouts, the legal and factual basis for continuing the locating alert may have changed. Article 90 of INTERPOL’s Rules requires the whereabouts of a missing person to be unknown to police. Finding the person does not create an automatic public “delete” button, but the Rules also require data to remain accurate and up to date and restrict retention after the original purpose has been achieved. The practical task is therefore to prove what the authorities know, trigger an update at source, and use the CCF correction/deletion route if INTERPOL data remain non-compliant. ^[E1]

What changes once the person has been found?

Article 90 says a Yellow Notice may be published to locate a missing person only where the disappearance has been reported and recorded by police and the person’s whereabouts are unknown to police. The same Rules require data to be accurate, relevant, not excessive and up to date. They also require the source to update recorded data regularly; once the original purpose has been achieved, continued retention in an INTERPOL police database requires the source to determine and justify a new purpose. Those rules make “known whereabouts” a data-purpose and data-quality issue, not merely a change to a public webpage. ^[E1]

CCF decisions show how this works in practice. In a 2025 family-matter decision, the CCF could not conclude that Yellow Notices still had a purpose under Article 90 where the children’s whereabouts and situation were known to the relevant authorities; the challenged data were ultimately ordered deleted. A 2017 decision likewise treated authorities’ knowledge of the children’s location as strong evidence that the locating purpose had been reached. A 2018 decision treated repeated official welfare and whereabouts reports as highly relevant, while cautioning that a Yellow Notice could still have a locating function if the child travelled. These anonymized decisions are fact-specific: they do not create an automatic-deletion rule for every person who is “found”. Conversely, a 2024 CCF decision maintained a Yellow Notice where the authorities knew only that the child was somewhere in another country but had not established the child’s specific location; the CCF treated the current location as unknown and accepted a continuing locating purpose if the child travelled. The practical distinction is therefore between sufficiently established current or specific whereabouts known to the relevant authorities and only general or country-level information. ^{[E2–E4, E8]}

Source update, correction and deletion are different routes

For a newly confirmed location, INTERPOL’s public guidance directs information to local or national police; its Yellow Notice guidance explains that local police will contact the National Central Bureau where appropriate, and the General Secretariat may also be contacted with information on a Yellow Notice subject’s whereabouts. This is the operational route for getting verified location information into the police chain. It is more accurate than assuming that a member of the public must contact an NCB directly. ^[E5]

Separate from that public reporting route, Article 81 of the RPD imposes a source-side duty once the purpose of a Notice has been achieved: the requesting NCB or international entity must withdraw its cooperation request or alert and immediately ask the General Secretariat to cancel the Notice. The General Secretariat must cancel it once achievement of the purpose is confirmed by the source. This source-side cancellation mechanism is distinct from an individual CCF request. ^[E1]

A separate legal route exists before the CCF. Article 18 of the Rules gives a person the right to submit directly to the CCF a request for access to, correction and/or deletion of data concerning that person. Correction fits inaccurate or stale fields; deletion can be requested where continued processing no longer complies with INTERPOL’s rules or no justified purpose remains. The CCF reviews the compliance of INTERPOL data processing with INTERPOL’s rules; it does not decide custody, criminal guilt, extradition or the merits of national proceedings. ^{[E1, E6]}

Evidence-to-issue matrix

Issue to establish	Evidence with the highest practical value	Why it matters
The person’s current or specific location is established	Recent police confirmation; official welfare/whereabouts report; official inter-authority correspondence or record confirming the current address or location	Directly tests Article 90 and the 2024 distinction between a sufficiently established current location and merely knowing that the person is somewhere in a country.
Relevant competent authorities know the current or specific location	Police acknowledgement; official correspondence between authorities; proof that a welfare/whereabouts report or confirmed address was transmitted	The 2017, 2018 and 2025 decisions gave weight to authority knowledge; the 2024 decision shows that country-level knowledge alone may be insufficient.
The processed data are stale or wrong	Current Notice copy or other known INTERPOL record plus newer official documents identifying the mismatch	Articles 12 and 48 make accuracy, currency and correction of data legally material.
The remaining dispute is custody/return, not location	Custody decisions, welfare reports and relevant return-case documents	Helps separate the location purpose from a different family-law dispute that INTERPOL is not competent to resolve.
Correction is enough, or deletion is required	Field-by-field list of inaccuracies; proof the locating purpose has ended; any explanation of a claimed new purpose	Matches the remedy to the actual defect and to Article 46’s purpose/retention logic.

[E1–E4, E8]

Practical decision tree after the person is found

Preserve the current position: save the public Yellow Notice if one exists, its reference details, dates and the exact data that appear inaccurate or outdated.
Obtain objective proof of location and, where possible, proof that police or another competent authority have verified the location.
Notify the local or national police handling the missing-person matter and provide the verified material. Ask whether the source data and international alert have been updated. Where useful, send the whereabouts information to the INTERPOL General Secretariat through the channel identified in its public guidance.
If INTERPOL data remain inaccurate, stale or otherwise non-compliant, prepare a CCF correction and/or deletion request. Since 10:00 CET on 26 March 2026, the secure CCF online portal is the required filing channel unless the Commission recognizes exceptional circumstances under its rules.
Frame the CCF request around the actual data question: Article 90 purpose, known whereabouts, Articles 12 and 46 data quality/purpose, the specific fields to correct, and the precise remedy sought. Do not ask the CCF to decide custody or other national merits.
After a favorable CCF decision, verify implementation. The Statute requires the General Secretariat to implement within one month of receipt, unless clarification is sought; members that received corrected or deleted data are then to be notified promptly, subject to the Statute’s confidentiality rules.

[E1, E5–E7]

Timing, implementation and revision

The CCF first determines admissibility. Under Article 40 of its Statute, a correction and/or deletion request is to be decided within nine months from the date it was declared admissible; the Requests Chamber may make a reasonable extension that must be communicated and explained. Decisions are final and binding on the Organization and the applicant. Article 41 sets the one-month implementation rule described above. Revision is exceptional rather than an ordinary appeal: Article 42 permits it only on newly discovered facts that could have led to a different conclusion, and the application must be made within six months after discovery of the fact. Current institutional practice also matters: INTERPOL’s official CCF sessions page states that the Commission has been experiencing delays in meeting its deadlines because of increased workload and is running a 2026 pilot to manage decision-making more evenly across the year. The statutory periods therefore should not be treated as a guaranteed case-specific completion date. ^{[E7, E9]}

Common failure modes

Treating “found” as automatic deletion instead of proving that competent authorities know the location and that no justified locating purpose remains.
Relying only on family statements or social-media posts when official police, welfare/whereabouts or other competent-authority confirmation can be obtained.
Telling a private applicant to contact an NCB directly as if that were INTERPOL’s public reporting rule; the official public route is local/national police, with General Secretariat contact also available for Yellow Notice whereabouts.
Asking the CCF to decide custody, return, guilt, extradition or another national merits issue rather than the compliance of INTERPOL data processing.
Equating disappearance of a public Yellow Notice webpage with deletion of all related data from the INTERPOL Information System, or the reverse.
Using an obsolete filing channel: from 26 March 2026 CCF requests go through the dedicated online portal unless exceptional circumstances are recognized.

Why this page is not the NCB or Red Notice page

The NCB page explains the national interface with INTERPOL; the Red Notice page concerns wanted-person alerts and their legal effect. Neither answers the post-location Yellow Notice problem: when known whereabouts undermine the Article 90 locating purpose, what evidence proves authority knowledge, and whether the next remedy is a source-side update, factual correction or deletion. That separate decision package is the reason this page remains distinct.