When the world’s greatest tournament kicks off this week, it will also become the largest live test of the machinery of cross-border control the democratic world has yet staged. The football is the spectacle. The apparatus behind it deserves equal attention.
On 11 June 2026, the largest FIFA World Cup in history begins. For the first time the tournament spans three countries (the United States, Canada and Mexico), and over the following month several million visitors will move between them, across borders, through checkpoints, into stadiums and fan zones, watched by billions more at home. It will be a celebration of the one thing that still reliably unites the world.
It will also be something else, and it is the something else that should concern anyone who practises in this field.
The human rights community has, rightly, sounded the alarm. Amnesty International has described the United States as facing a human rights emergency in the run-up to the tournament. Human Rights Watch, drawing on immigration data, has reported that well over a hundred thousand people were arrested by immigration authorities in and around the eleven US host cities in a single early stretch of enforcement. Days before kick-off, a coalition of advocacy groups issued a national travel advisory warning international fans, particularly immigrants and people of colour, of heightened scrutiny, device searches and the risk of detention. Fans of several qualifying nations, among them Haiti, Iran and Senegal, cannot enter the United States at all unless they held a valid visa before the start of this year.
These are serious warnings and they are being made by serious organisations. But they describe the symptoms. What for those of us who practice in the field of international law and international policing mechanisms, is the system underneath.
A single integrated apparatus
For most of modern history, the instruments of state control over the movement of individuals were separate matters, operated by separate authorities, for separate purposes. Immigration enforcement was one system. Criminal watchlists were another. International police cooperation, the INTERPOL notice regime, was a third, sitting at one remove from all of them. Biometric surveillance, where it existed, was a fourth.
What a mega-event of this scale now does is fuse them. Facial recognition, drone monitoring and phone surveillance, already documented in the policing of protest across the host states, are layered over immigration databases, which are in turn cross-referenced against international alerts. The fan who crosses from one host country to another three times in a fortnight is not simply buying a match ticket. They are presenting themselves, repeatedly, to an integrated apparatus that did not exist in this consolidated form even a decade ago.
The infrastructure being deployed is openly described by those building it as one of the largest security operations in the host region’s history, and explicitly as a rehearsal for the 2028 Olympics. Fans have been urged to act as “extra eyes and ears.” Drones entering restricted airspace can be brought down. None of this is hidden. The point is that what is piloted at a tournament does not end with the tournament. It is normalised, retained, and reused.
The quiet instrument
Within that apparatus, the instrument to watch most closely is the one the public understands least: the INTERPOL Red Notice and its lesser-known cousin, the diffusion.
A Red Notice is not an arrest warrant. It is a request, circulated by one state through INTERPOL’s channels, asking others to locate and provisionally detain a person pending extradition. In a well-functioning system, it is a tool of justice. In practice, it has become one of the most reliable instruments of transnational repression available to a determined government. Russia alone accounts for a striking share of all public Red Notices. A number of other autocratic States have attracted equal concern, most recently Egypt. The UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights last year recorded its deep concern at the misuse of the notice system by certain member states. In November, UN Special Rapporteurs issued, for the first time, a formal communication to INTERPOL over a state’s use of Red Notices to pursue exiled human rights defenders, characterising it as transnational repression in breach of INTERPOL’s own constitution.
A Red Notice does not announce itself. A person can carry one for years without knowing. They discover it when they cross a border, which is precisely what several million people are about to do, repeatedly, in a compressed window, under heightened scrutiny, in jurisdictions where immigration detention is already operating at scale.
The legal safeguards exist, but they are thinner than most assume. Under US Department of Justice guidance, a federal arrest may not be made on the basis of a Red Notice alone, and immigration authorities have issued internal direction not to rely exclusively on notices in enforcement decisions. Those are real protections. They are also internal policies, not binding guarantees. That is exactly the gap that has dominated the pre-tournament debate, as host-city officials seek assurances that enforcement will not occur at venues while federal authorities decline to rule it out.
Why this matters before the whistle, not after
There is a remedy. A wrongly issued Red Notice can be challenged before INTERPOL’s Commission for the Control of Files (CCF), and such challenges, properly run, succeed. But the Commission is slow and its process is opaque. A person detained at a border on a politically motivated notice may well be vindicated, but only months later, when the tournament is long over and the damage, personal and reputational, is done.
That is the heart of the matter for anyone with genuine cross-border exposure: a prior designation, a politically charged business dispute, or a public profile that a foreign government finds inconvenient. The time to understand your exposure is before you present yourself to the apparatus, not at the moment it flags you. Assessing whether a notice or diffusion exists, whether a designation creates downstream risk, and what pre-emptive steps are available is a matter of strategy as much as law. By the time it becomes litigation, the leverage has usually been lost.
The real contest
Football will, as it should, dominate the coming weeks. But this tournament is also a laboratory. It is where the surveillance and enforcement infrastructure of the next decade is being assembled, tested at scale, and quietly normalised under the cover of celebration. This is, it should be noted, the same tournament whose organisers awarded the host nation’s leader a peace prize months before a ball was kicked.
The world will be watching the football. Those of us who work in this field will also be watching what is watching the fans. The most important contest of this World Cup may not be the one played on the pitch.
Toby Cadman is Head of Outline Chambers and co-founder of The Mentors Group. His practice spans international criminal law, intnernaitonal commercial law and arbitration, human rights, extradition and sanctions, including challenges to the misuse of INTERPOL Red Notices before the Commission for the Control of Files. Outline Chambers and The Mentors Group advise individuals, corporations and states navigating cross-border enforcement, designation and reputational risk.
