As you mentioned, the previous INTERPOL president, Meng Hongwei of China, was disappeared by China just months ago, supposedly to be charged with corruption. I believe the Xi Jinping government was widely disappointed at how few names on their global target list he had captured for them. By the way, the Chinese 100 most wanted list is legally called Operation Skynet. It makes clear who is really in charge and that will be the case with Russia as well, including all Russian oligarchs and bureaucrats around the world. They serve at Putin's pleasure, and they and their families live at Putin's pleasure, as his global assassination campaign has made very clear.
The question is this: How did we get here? How did a Russian general become the head of INTERPOL? It was by taking the road paved with good intentions. Since the end of the Cold War, the western part of the mission is to engage with dictatorships and to invite them into groups like G7, INTERPOL, WTO and the rest. The idea was that partnerships and economic ties would liberalize their autocracies and would raise the standards of transparency and their standards of living.
Instead, the flow has gone in the other direction in almost every case. China is now approaching a one-man dictatorship like Putin's, and Russia is a completely authoritarian state. The global freedom index has declined for seven straight years. INTERPOL is just the latest example of what happens when you abandon your standards and your principles in the name of engagement. Instead of spreading liberalization and co-operation, engagement has allowed Russia and the rest to spread corruption in an attempt to drive everyone down to their level.
After inviting such regimes into free world institutions, it will turn out to be harder to remove these countries, but removed they must be if these institutions are to stand for anything. Otherwise, it's only a matter of time before they are subverted and turned against the concept of freedom and justice that they were designed to uphold. For instance, look at the United Nations Human Rights Council with Saudi Arabia, Iran and other infamous human rights violators.
I hope that these hearings will help you to understand the danger of having countries like Russia have so much influence in INTERPOL or in other international organizations, which, as you said, operate by international law, but very often operate by a law of their own, and there is very little transparency, which is also unacceptable.
Thank you.