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More and more critics are calling on Interpol to reject a Russian candidate at the head of the organization, fearing that Moscow could not abuse the presidency to target political opponents.
The Kremlin denounced what is said to be "interference" in the vote, expected Wednesday at the closing of Interpol's annual conference in Dubai.
Concerns have been expressed about Russia 's earlier requests for Interpol "Red Notices", or international arrest warrants, against those who have been guilty of the Kremlin.
The head of the Russian Ministry of Interior and current vice president of Interpol, Alexander Prokopchuk, seems to be the favorite.
In an open letter this week, a bipartisan group of US Senators said that choosing Prokopchuk would amount to "putting a fox in the head of a henhouse".
"Russia regularly abuses Interpol for the purpose of settling accounts and harassing political opponents, dissidents and journalists," they wrote.
Senators said Prokopchuk was "personally involved" in this strategy since being elected to the Interpol Executive Committee.
Delegates from Interpol member countries will elect a new president to replace Meng Hongwei, who went missing in his native China in September.
Beijing later informed Interpol that Meng had resigned after being accused of accepting bribes.
The other candidate in the running is South Korea, Kim Jong-Yang, acting president. Whoever is elected will serve Meng's mandate until 2020.
– "political persecution" –
The anti-Kremlin figures raised concerns before the vote, including Alexei Navalny, the head of the Russian opposition jailed several times by the authorities.
"Our team has been abused by Interpol for political persecution by Russia," Navalny wrote on Twitter. "I do not think that a Russian president will help reduce such violations."
The controversy also comes amid security concerns raised by accusations of Russian agents responsible for espionage poisoning in Britain and attempted piracy of the global chemical weapons monitoring network.
Former US ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, said the candidacy was "worrying for anyone who believes in the rule of law."
Ukraine, deeply in disagreement with Moscow over its annexation of Crimea and its support for the eastern separatists, threatened to withdraw from Interpol if Prokopchuk had won.
The Kremlin rejected the letter of US senators as a "striking example" of an attempt to interfere in the electoral process.
"It is an interference (…) in the elections to an international organization," said the spokesman of President Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Peskov.
Analysts point out that the position of president is largely honorary, with much greater influence in the hands of the secretary general, currently the German shareholder Jurgen Stock.
– The "tentacles" of Putin –
However, Bill Browder, a British financier who was briefly arrested in Spain this year under a Red Notice issued in Moscow, insisted that Putin was trying to "extend his criminal tentacles to the four corners of the world." ".
Browder has been fighting to get in 2012 US sanctions against Russian officials suspected of being involved in the death of his tax advisor, Sergei Magnitsky.
Magnitsky died in prison in 2009 after accusing Russian tax evaders of $ 230 million.
Russia rejected the accusations and announced this week that it was opening a new investigation on Browder suspected of running a "transnational criminal gang", even suggesting that it was behind the death of Magnitsky.
Russian prosecutors said he would be placed on a list of wanted people "in the near future".
Prokopchuk, multilingual, worked in the field of tax enforcement before becoming Interpol's Russian representative in 2006, according to his biography published on the website of the Ministry of the Interior.
A decade later, he was elected to a position of vice president of the organization.
Russia has already made its mark even if the Moscow candidate does not run this organization, told AFP Andrei Soldatov, security expert.
"Even if people are not extradited to Russia, they are facing problems," he said, particularly with regard to border detention and damage to the reputation of being published with an opinion of Interpol.
"Interpol is a system that Russia has learned to use well for its own purposes".
