Judicial control of international police cooperation and its limits
By: Jorge Leyva
International police cooperation is formally designed as a technical mechanism to facilitate information exchange and operational coordination between states. Its legitimacy rests on a functional assumption: cooperation serves lawful investigations conducted within domestic systems that remain subject to judicial control. When that assumption fails, cooperation mechanisms cease to be neutral channels and begin to operate as autonomous sources of legal effects.
The structural problem arises when police cooperation produces consequences comparable to coercive measures without passing through an equivalent level of judicial scrutiny. Alerts, notices and database entries may restrict movement, trigger arrests or justify surveillance, even though they originate in procedures that lack adversarial guarantees and are insulated from early judicial review. The resulting effects are not ancillary. They directly alter the legal position of the individual across multiple jurisdictions.
From a legal standpoint, the decisive element is not the formal classification of these measures as administrative or informational. It is the intensity and predictability of their effects. When cooperation tools foreseeably lead to deprivation of liberty, reputational harm or transnational restrictions, they perform a function analogous to judicial acts. Treating them as purely technical instruments obscures their material impact and displaces accountability.
The absence of early judicial control creates a systemic asymmetry. Requests initiated by one state circulate rapidly and are operationalised by others, while mechanisms to challenge their basis are slow, opaque or inaccessible. This temporal imbalance allows restrictive effects to materialise long before any substantive examination of legality or proportionality occurs. In practice, the harm precedes the review.
This configuration is particularly problematic in politically sensitive cases. Where criminal processes are activated in contexts of repression or selective enforcement, international cooperation multiplies their reach. What may begin as a domestic misuse of penal power becomes a transnational constraint, reproduced by states that have not independently verified the legitimacy of the underlying action.
Judicial deference to the technical character of cooperation mechanisms does not resolve this problem. It reinforces it. By declining to scrutinise measures on the basis that they originate outside the judicial sphere, courts allow a zone of effective power to operate beyond constitutional standards. The result is not neutrality, but a gap in protection.
The legal consequence is structural. International police cooperation cannot be insulated from judicial control when it produces effects equivalent to coercive state action. Systems that fail to introduce early, effective and accessible review mechanisms do not merely risk isolated error. They institutionalise transnational constraints without corresponding guarantees, allowing punitive effects to emerge through cooperation rather than adjudication.