Interpol will seek approval at its general assembly in Hong Kong next month for a new “silver notice” system to target criminals’ assets and speed up financial investigations into transnational crime.

Hong Kong’s police chief also pledged to make financial investigations and scams a top priority in discussions with overseas counterparts during Interpol’s annual meeting, which the city is hosting for the first time.

Interpol secretary general Valdecy Urquiza said in an interview in Hong Kong that the global law enforcement organisation would strive to keep technical channels for data exchange open among member states despite growing geopolitical tensions worldwide.

“Transnational crime has become the standard. Criminal activities, they necessarily relate to more than one country, you see criminal organisations in one part of the world targeting communities in a different part of the world,” Urquiza said.

“The answer to that is international policing cooperation.”Interpol’s annual general assembly will be held from November 30 to December 3, with more than 2,000 representatives from its 196 member states expected to attend. The assembly, Interpol’s supreme governing body, adopts resolutions on major policies, resources, working methods and financial matters.

Urquiza said the organisation aimed to pass a resolution on the silver notice system at the assembly. The system, which has been tested for two years, aims to identify and seize financial assets belonging to criminals.

The notice could help prevent criminals from reorganising their enterprises and recruiting new members while law enforcement agencies were conducting investigations and arrests, he explained.

Urquiza said the relevant jurisdictions would then use existing legal means to seize and seek the return of the assets in question from other jurisdictions, and that the silver notice could speed up financial investigations.

“We give a powerful tool for police officials that will be able to send analysis to the entire law enforcement community about that specific [criminal] group and the specific assets that they are trying to locate,” he said.

The silver notice will supplement Interpol’s colour-coded notice system, which covers international requests for cooperation, arrests and information. The red notice, which is an international request for law enforcement agencies to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition or surrender, is part of the system.

Commissioner of Police Joe Chow Yat-ming said he hoped, as host, to build a platform for attending police forces to discuss how to combat transnational crime, while focusing on building new partnerships beyond Asia. He said financial investigations and scams would be priority areas for discussion with overseas partners.

“The problem is very serious and also very imminent; that’s why it must be the priority of things,” Chow said.

He noted that scams accounted for half of Hong Kong’s reported crimes last month, whereas no robbery cases were recorded.

Chow said most of the force’s established partnerships for operations and intelligence exchange were with Asean members and other Asian countries.

“We will try to make good use of this general assembly to build rapport and also to have more bilateral meetings, so that other than establishing contact, [we can] at least build up some mutual understanding,” Chow said. Hong Kong would also look to African states to foster mutual exchanges, he added.

Urquiza also underscored the severity of global fraud trends, saying Interpol had recorded a 55 per cent increase in the number of cases reported across the world last year.

“This is the sort of increase that we didn’t see before in any other type of cases,” he said.

Urquiza said it was important for Interpol to ensure member countries had technical channels to exchange information regardless of diplomatic ties, as criminal activity became ever more borderless in an increasingly tense geopolitical environment.

“We are an organisation that serves as a technical platform for enforcement agencies, a neutral platform,” Urquiza said.

He added that if diplomatic tensions caused countries to stop communicating or sharing information, a gap could open for criminal activity to fester.

Interpol’s mission would be to keep “technical channels” open for police cooperation regardless of countries’ diplomatic relations.

Among its tools are databases accessible to law enforcement agencies containing more than 150 million records on wanted people, stolen property, forged documents, threats related to terrorism and cybercrime.

Non-governmental organisations have accused some authoritarian states of abusing Interpol’s notice system and databases for political persecution.

Urquiza said the body had robust mechanisms to prevent misuse, including an independent body that had the final say on whether information submitted was compliant with Interpol’s constitution.

Every piece of information submitted for publication on Interpol’s databases is assessed by a separate group of police officials and lawyers for compliance with the organisation’s constitution, which prohibits activities of a political, military, religious or racial character.

With the force establishing the Hong Kong International Academy of Policing next month, ahead of the general assembly, Chow said he hoped the institution would collaborate with Interpol to provide training programmes for members.

“We would like to work closely with Interpol, just like before, and in the future,” he said.