Hagued Mums – Exclusive Investigation
16th November 2025
When survivors of domestic abuse cross borders seeking safety, many anticipate legal uncertainty — but few expect to be hunted.
Across multiple jurisdictions, a pattern has emerged in which mothers fleeing violence with their children are being recast not as victims, but as international fugitives.
Their alleged offence: safeguarding a child from harm.
A years-long investigation by Hagued Mums reveals how INTERPOL systems — designed for tracking violent criminals — are being co-opted by certain National Central Bureaus (NCBs) to pursue mothers involved in custody disputes, often at the request of abusive former partners. The results are life-altering: airport arrests, travel restrictions, global surveillance.
What should be a family matter becomes an international police case.
A Criminal-Justice Tool Misapplied to Family Cases
Red Notices were created for terrorists, traffickers, and violent fugitives. Yet they increasingly appear in cases where:
- custody decisions exist in two jurisdictions,
- Hague Convention proceedings are active,
- foreign courts have issued non-return orders,
- domestic-violence allegations remain unresolved.
INTERPOL’s 2022 policy reforms expressly forbid the circulation of Red Notices in such circumstances.
But those safeguards are often disregarded.
For survivors, the consequences are immediate:
Borders transform into ambush points; daily life becomes a calculation between safety and potential incarceration.
What emerges is a policing system inadvertently enabling coercive control across borders.
Inside the System: The Specialist Who Helped Build What Later Targeted Her
Within Hagued Mums, a unique source of insight shapes their investigative and technical work: their INTERPOL specialist previously worked on the development of I-Checkit, a high-profile INTERPOL verification system. Her role provided:
- direct familiarity with INTERPOL’s internal data architecture,
- knowledge of how national police interface with the organisation,
- insight into operational vulnerabilities that permit misuse.
Then her life changed.
After fleeing a violent partner with her child, she found herself facing the same mechanisms she had once helped refine — a system she understood from the inside, now weaponised against her.
Colleagues say that this combination of lived experience and technical knowledge offers a rare vantage point for understanding not only how misuse occurs, but why it continues unchecked.
Under her guidance, the Hagued Mums team now handles:
- advanced data checks,
- pre-emptive applications to defend mothers from countries with documented patterns of misuse,
- detailed submissions to remove Red Notices that violate INTERPOL rules.
Despite the team being able to remove unlawful Red Notices, mothers still cannot challenge the original arrest warrant issued domestically by the country that triggered the request, due to police secrecy rules. Local NCB’s are repeatedly refusing access to that information, making appeals impossible.
A Built-In Bias: INTERPOL Communicates Only With Police
One of the structural flaws enabling misuse is that INTERPOL communicates exclusively with law enforcement.
This means:
- neither victims nor lawyers can contact INTERPOL directly,
- lawyers hold no specialist pathways or formal privileges,
- NCB’s can upload of a notice within minutes,
- removal applications can take a year or longer — even in clear-cut violations.
NCBs in several countries, including the UK, routinely shield their conduct behind:
- Article 35, which blocks disclosure of files,
- NCDN (Neither Confirm Nor Deny) policies, preventing victims from accessing warrant information.
Hagued Mums can remove the Red Notice — but the mother remains barred from appealing the originating police warrant because the issuing state refuses to release it. Experts describe this as incompatible with fundamental due-process rights.
Case Study: A Mother in Thailand — and a Red Notice Filed After the UK Lost in Court
One recent case illuminates how blatantly some police forces appear willing to breach INTERPOL rules.
The Context
A UK mother fled with her daughter after reporting serious abuse.
Her case entered:
- Hague proceedings,
- family-court litigation in Thailand.
In 2022, the Thai court issued a non-return order.
In 2023, the father’s appeal was dismissed.
Throughout the proceedings, Hagued Mums conducted regular INTERPOL checks — all clear.
The Turning Point
Two weeks after the UK lost the case in Thailand, the UK NCB uploaded a Red Notice targeting the mother.
What It Reveals
The UK’s actions occurred after the 2022 restrictions were introduced and just two weeks after the Thai appellate court ruled against them — a timing that experts say indicates not confusion over policy, but a deliberate shift to a different weapon when legal avenues they were hoping would fall in their favour failed.
In every UK-involved case examined by Hagued Mums, investigators found further violations:
- refusals to disclose the underlying arrest warrants,
- deliberate invocation of NCDN policies to block victim access,
- reliance on outdated, incomplete, or misleading information,
- failure to apply domestic-violence protections required under INTERPOL rules.
For many legal analysts, this pattern suggests systemic misuse, not isolated procedural error.
INTERPOL ultimately removed the Red Notice in early 2024 — but only after months of submissions, evidence, and procedural challenge by the Hagued Mums team.
Why This Continues: Convenience, Power, and Lack of Oversight
Three major structural factors enable continued misuse:
1. Administrative Speed Favouring Police, Not Safeguards
Uploading a notice is easy; assessing family-law rulings takes time.
2. Legal and Institutional Asymmetry
Abusive partners often have state cooperation.
Mothers fleeing violence rarely do.
3. No Penalties for Misuse
INTERPOL’s Commission for the Control of Files can delete unlawful notices —
but it cannot sanction the NCBs that uploaded them.
The Larger Implications
If national police can knowingly misuse INTERPOL systems in family cases without consequence, it raises broader questions about accountability in international policing networks.
This issue is no longer confined to family law.
It speaks to the integrity of global policing infrastructure.
For many survivors, the final irony remains:
The system designed to protect them is the one used to pursue them.
