UAE Interpol Red Notice Statistics: 173 Extraditions in 2025

The UAE closed 2025 with 173 extradition decisions tied to money laundering and terrorist financing cases, according to figures published by the country’s own anti-money laundering authority. For anyone tracking an Interpol Red Notice connected to the UAE — as a subject, a family member, or a legal team — these numbers show how active enforcement has become and where the country’s priorities sit. Below is a breakdown of the official data, the cases behind it, and what the trend means in practice.

The figure comes from the General Secretariat of the National Anti-Money Laundering and Combatting Financing of Terrorism and Financing of Illegal Organizations Committee (NAMLCFTC), released through an infographic titled “UAE: No Safe Haven for Criminals” and reported by Gulf News on 11 August 2026. The secretariat framed the 173 decisions as part of a broader push to keep the UAE out of reach for people trying to use the country as a haven from prosecution abroad.

That figure sits alongside a second data set the same committee released earlier in the year. Reporting its full 2025 anti-money laundering performance indicators, the NAMLCFTC confirmed that the UAE confiscated Dh4.23 billion during 2025 enforcement action, on top of the extradition total. Both releases point the same direction: extradition activity tied to financial crime and terrorism financing has become a measurable, publicly reported part of the UAE’s law enforcement output, not an occasional headline.

The same NAMLCFTC 2025 performance report breaks the incoming caseload into two channels: mutual legal assistance (MLA) requests, which cover cooperation on evidence and investigations, and extradition requests, which seek the physical handover of a wanted person. The gap between the two growth rates is the more telling number.

Extradition requests grew five times faster than MLA requests over the same period. Investigators abroad are not just asking the UAE for documents and cooperation anymore — they are increasingly asking for the person.

The NAMLCFTC infographic named several of the cases that make up the 173 decisions:

The spread of destination countries — Ireland, Belgium, France, China, Sweden — reflects how the UAE’s extradition activity now runs across a wide network of treaty partners rather than a handful of longstanding relationships, a pattern our international extradition team sees reflected in the caseload we handle directly.

The framework behind these numbers is Federal Law No. 39 of 2006 on International Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters, as amended by Federal Decree-Law No. 38 of 2023. It sets out the conditions under which the UAE will hand over a wanted person: a valid legal basis (a bilateral treaty, a multilateral convention, or reciprocity), dual criminality between the alleged conduct and UAE law, and a formal court process before any handover.

An Interpol Red Notice is usually the trigger that starts this process, not the legal basis for the handover itself. Interpol’s own guidance is explicit that a Red Notice is a request to locate and provisionally arrest, not an international arrest warrant — the actual extradition decision rests entirely with UAE courts and the Ministry of Justice, working through the domestic legal framework described above.

A rising extradition count is not, on its own, a reason to assume every notice ends in a handover. UAE courts still review each case individually, and the law preserves specific grounds to resist extradition — including risk of an unfair trial, political motivation behind the request, or the absence of dual criminality. What the 2025 figures do confirm is that requesting countries are using the UAE’s cooperation channels more, and more successfully, than in previous years.

For anyone who has just learned of a Red Notice, a provisional arrest, or an extradition request naming them, the practical steps that matter are the same regardless of the yearly statistics: confirming the legal basis of the request, checking whether dual criminality genuinely applies to the alleged conduct, and engaging counsel before the first hearing rather than after. Our Interpol lawyers in the UAE review the request itself, not just the headline that a notice exists, before advising on next steps.