CCF Application: The Portal, Forms, and What to Include

Unlike a court that hands you a fill-in template, the CCF asks for a written request that identifies you, states clearly what you want, and argues why Interpol’s rules require it. The structure is up to you within the portal’s requirements. That freedom is a feature: a well-organised written submission can make a far stronger case than boxes on a form ever could — but it also means the burden of clarity is on you.

Requests are filed through the CCF’s online portal (a postal route also exists). A critical practical point under the current system: the portal takes one request type per submission. An access request — to confirm and learn what data is held — is a separate filing from a deletion request. In practice you almost always file the access request first, read the response, then file the deletion request built on what it revealed. Trying to combine them causes confusion and delay.

Whatever its exact layout, an effective deletion request contains the same essential elements:

• Identity — who you are, with documentation, so the CCF can match you to its records.
• The relief sought — that the data be deleted or corrected, stated plainly.
• The ground — the specific rule the notice breaches, drawn from the recognised grounds.
• The argument — a concise, factual explanation connecting your evidence to that rule.
• The evidence — documents that support the ground, referenced clearly in the text.

The portal allows a limited number of appendices — currently up to twenty documents — so you must choose what to attach with care. Label each one clearly and refer to it by name in your argument, so a reader moves from claim to proof without searching. A useful trick: where a document is freely available online (a public court record, a news report, an NGO report), cite the URL in your text rather than uploading the file, preserving your limited appendix slots for material that exists only in your own file.

Submit in one of Interpol’s working languages, and provide translations of key documents rather than leaving the Chamber to interpret them. Keep the tone measured and factual; a disciplined, well-referenced submission is read more carefully than an angry or sprawling one. Length is not persuasion — one or two strong, well-evidenced grounds beat a long list of weak complaints. See the CCF process walkthrough for how the request is examined once filed.

Most avoidable failures fall into a few buckets: incomplete identity documentation (the leading cause of admissibility problems), arguing innocence instead of rule-compliance, submitting no real evidence, mixing request types in one filing, or attaching a disorganised pile of unlabelled documents. Every one of these is within your control. Fix them before you file, keep a full copy of everything as submitted, and you remove most of the reasons a request stalls before it is ever examined on the merits.

Because there is no official template, a clear self-imposed structure does a great deal of work. A request that a reader can follow in a single pass tends to look, in outline, like this. Open with a short identification section — who you are, with the identity documents attached and listed. Follow with a one-paragraph statement of the request: that you seek deletion (or correction) of specified data. Then a concise factual background, kept to what the CCF actually needs, not your life story.

The heart is the legal grounds section, where you name each rule the notice breaches — Article 3, Article 83, non-refoulement, ne bis in idem, Article 12 data quality — and, under each, connect your evidence to it in plain language, referencing the appendices by number. Close with a brief conclusion restating the relief sought. Keep headings, number your appendices, and cross-reference them precisely so the reader never has to hunt. This is not a rigid form — you can adapt it — but a disciplined skeleton like this prevents the two failures that sink self-filed requests: burying the ground under narrative, and leaving evidence disconnected from the argument it is meant to support. If you would rather have a second pair of eyes confirm the structure before filing, that is exactly the kind of bounded, openly priced help described on our Services & Fees page.

The most common sequencing mistake is trying to do everything in one filing. Under the current portal system, each submission handles one request type, and the two you care about are distinct. An access request asks the CCF to confirm whether your data is held and, so far as disclosure rules allow, what it says and where it came from. A deletion request asks the CCF to remove or correct that data because it breaches Interpol’s rules. They are separate filings, and in almost every case the access request comes first.

The reason is practical. You cannot argue effectively that a notice is politically motivated, or a disguised commercial dispute, or procedurally defective, until you know what the notice actually says and which country issued it. The access response is the raw material for the deletion argument — it tells you the charge, the source, and often the gaps you can exploit. File blind, before you have that information, and you are guessing at both the ground and the evidence. So treat the two-step not as bureaucratic friction but as the natural order of the work: confirm and learn, then challenge on what you learned. The only common exception is where you already hold reliable independent knowledge of the notice and the clock is against you — an imminent extradition, say — in which case counsel may move faster and combine steps strategically. For everyone else, access first, deletion second, is the sequence that wins.