 Thank you all for coming to this meeting with the Secretary-General of Interpol, Ronald Noble. As you know, he came here 14 years ago when he was coming up as the Secretary-General of Interpol. That is when Iceland helped the European conference of Interpol that was in the year 2000 and made 2000. He made a pledge during that time to visit all the 190 countries of Interpol and by visiting Iceland today he has completed that particular circle. So he has visited 190 Interpol countries and this is his last visit as Secretary-General of Interpol. It is a great pleasure for us, the Icelandic police, of course, to welcome him and his entrepreneurs to Iceland and give you the press the opportunity to address him with questions and interviews and I thought that it was an excellent opportunity for us to show also the press the unity of the Icelandic police and the international police community. Thank you, thank you. The floor is yours. So as Harold mentioned, when I first came here in 2000 in May, I was just the Executive Committee candidate to become Secretary-General and the world was far different back in May of 2000 than what it is now, but as I just said I promised that if confirmed and if re-elected I would eventually make it to all Interpol member countries which I'm doing today and completing the circle, as Harold said. First let me say the cooperation between Interpol and the police force is as strong as it could be. This country is a great country, low crime rate, very educated population, very well trained and educated police force. Really, really a pleasure to visit. In terms of crimes affecting this country, when I was just speaking to Harold and others as I go around the world and see the world changing, it's this concern we all have about cybercrime and cyber thefts and cyber threats and that's something where you can be hit from anywhere in the world at any time and your banking, financial institutions, businesses and citizens have to be prepared for it. Interpol's created this Interpol global complex for innovation focusing on cybercrime and cyber security. It's our goal to share information with Iceland and other countries concerning the MO, the techniques that these organized crime groups are using for their targeted cyber attacks. Other than that, from a world security perspective or a crime threat perspective, you're in a safe country, a great country and as I said, it's a pleasure to be happy to answer any specific questions you might have about Interpol or about Interpol's relationship with Iceland and I should note that this is the most senior and longest serving commissioner of police in the world. I thought I would out-survive him but I have not. My term ends in November 7th of this year but your commissioner has a reputation that he's gained worldwide for being a professional who never allows politics or anything other than the rule of law to drive his decision-making. So I just wanted to say it's an honor to have come here when you were young and to leave when you're still a young commissioner. Thank you. Any questions you might have? How are we, Icelandic police, prepared for cyber threats? All of us are trying to get more and more prepared because it takes longer for legislation to be put in place because citizens are rightly concerned about data protection and their personal privacy. You have to be very careful in what you're structuring and so we are all not where we should be because the attacks come much faster than the defenses but with the global complex for cybersecurity and cyber crime that we just opened on October 1st of this year, we hope to become more prepared than we are. And again, this is something that I speak as Secretary General and say that it's something all countries need to be concerned about because it's so expensive to build up cyber defenses and it's so easy for innocent citizens to be deceived and allow the cyber criminals into their personal finances. Thank you. There has been a lot of discussion globally on the war on drugs, especially after this report came out by Mr. Kofi Annan a couple of years ago. What are your views on that? Has the war on drugs been a failure globally? Do we need new measures? Yeah. So we have 190 member countries in our poll and we're a country organization where we believe one country, one vote, we have no security council, no right to veto. And each of our countries is a sovereign. They decide and their citizens decide what kind of laws they want with regard to drugs. We know that there are many, many, many organized crime groups, transnational organized crime groups that traffic in a variety of drugs and they use a host of violent crimes, threats and extortion in order to reap tremendous profits. Interpol's view is that when those countries seek those individuals to be arrested and those individuals flee internationally, Interpol should help alert other countries and help have those people arrested. On a local basis, a national basis, we know that countries around the world are beginning to focus more on demand reduction and to lower the penalties for drug trafficking at the use level in order to free up space and prisons and to try to deal with the problem differently. So I believe it's very important for the world not to judge any country that's trying to focus on demand reduction as opposed to classic enforcement and share that knowledge and experience around the world. It's a matter for the sovereign, as you mentioned, but does it impose problems for Interpol or make the world more complex and forcing the prohibitions over when individual countries are taking measures and then we see individual states within the United States, passing legislations, liberal legislations when it comes to for the use of my own. That's a fair question and answering it. I'll explain a little bit about how Interpol works. So we have 190 member countries and the sovereign country decides whether someone in that country or who's gone through that country is wanted for arrest. So if that satisfies our standards, that it's not political, not military, not religious, not racial nature, we then publicize that around the world. Then the receiving country of this notification has to decide is the country that's requesting arrest in a country we have an extradition treaty with? Is it a country that we collaborate with? Is the offense that's being prosecuted one that would be offense in our country? So actually when applying it on an individual basis, it's not a problem because each sovereign country decides whether or not to enforce another country's request for arrest. But from a policy perspective, which is a question you asked me in the beginning, it's very difficult for me as Secretary General to articulate a global policy. I can do it for terrorism. I can do it for foreign fighters. But for drug trafficking, I can't do it. Would you consider Iceland a relatively safe country against terrorism? I'd say I considered a safe country, one of the safest countries in terms of all forms of crime, including terrorism. I can't understand why it took me 14 years to come back here. It's so safe. And as you can imagine when I'm making a mission, my staff prepares a threat assessment, a crime assessment, and an assessment of the policing. And when I read my materials, and of course I'm fairly up to speed with the crime issues in Iceland, I'm reminded of an issue that's even more delicate than drug trafficking in a country I come from. I'm an American citizen. It's the issue of gun control, gun rights. And you know that in the U.S. there's a huge debate about whether an armed population can be a safe population. And when you look at the number of people who own arms in your country and how few crimes there are related to arms in this country, you see it's very possible. I think the death rate here is, I think it's like 1.8 per 100,000, and in my country I think it's 5.8. So it is a very safe country to be in. So armed citizenry is in principle a bad thing in your opinion? Yeah. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I only hear this here. Armed citizenry is in principle a bad thing? No, I think it's in principle a very good thing. An armed law-biting citizenry is, I believe, a very important principle that is held very, very closely in my country and I believe in this country as well. But you mentioned earlier that we have very few guns here and we have low level of violence. I mean, we don't have people who own a country. It's only like countries. So you said we should tighten gun control even more? No, listen, two things I didn't say so far. One, I didn't say you had few guns here. I thought the opposite. I thought hunting was a very important part of life for citizens here and I thought there were about 200,000 guns in circulation in this country for hunting related activities. So I didn't make any statement about there being few guns and I wanted to make the statement that this country proves you can have a large number of guns in circulation in relation to the population and still have a safe country. I was wondering, you were speaking in Paris a few days ago on the database for foreign fighters. This is relatively new database, correct? Yes. How does it work and is this something that Iceland could in this way participate or is participating? Well, Iceland is participating in the following way. Foreign fighters and terrorists and other dangerous transnational criminals use stolen passports and crossing borders. If they use their own identity, the increase is the likelihood of their being caught. So they use stolen or counterfeit passports. Our database has 43 million of these passports and is screened about 800 million times and Iceland's screening of our database is such that virtually every person that comes in the country, comes through the country now has his or her passport screen. So you're able to reduce the likelihood of having foreign fighters or any other terrorists come here. Secondly, Iceland has a very integrated police database network and so police officers who have smartphones and iPads and will consult the police databases, will very easily consult Interpol databases as well. So, what we're trying to do for Interpol is we're building a database of the actual foreign fighters. Those who are named and wanted for arrest, we create notices for them, what we call red notices. We have foreign fighters who are under investigation, but not yet wanted for arrest. We have what are called green notices, which alerts member countries that when this person comes into the country, be careful, watch the person. He's under investigation for being a foreign fighter. And then those foreign fighters or terrorists who you've stolen or lost travel documents that are in our database, Iceland screens them on a regular basis. So Iceland is cooperating with this? Yes, very closely. Has this database been successfully used in apprehending any foreign fighters recently? I don't want to answer anything about an ongoing investigation except to say that the database and our country's use of this database has alerted countries to foreign fighters seeking to enter a country or inside a country. One of the reasons why this approach, Interpol's approach is a good approach is is that if the screening occurs at the border, you can simply not let the person come into the country or go through the country without making an arrest. And since September 11th of 2001, the focus on law enforcement to fight terrorism is to prevent and disrupt and thwart and not necessarily just arrest. And these foreign fighters, they are of various nationalities. And has that been a surprising result to see how many nationalities have been involved in this? It's shocking. It's not just a surprising result. It's a shocking result, especially when we think about the foreign fighters linked to the terrorist group that we term the cowardly murderers. You think about people who grew up in societies that are well educated, where the rule of law is respected, coming from what you consider good backgrounds and yet being tempted or deciding to align themselves with groups that murder and terrorize the way that these groups do. It's shocking. It should shock all of us. There have been reports about the large numbers from the Scandinavian countries. Has that also gathered some focus? I know that in Norway, for example, there have been discussions about relatively large groups in the Norwegians taking part in fighting Syria and Iraq. Because of, you know, my perspective is global. So I would, rather than saying Scandinavian, I would say Western Europe, North America, Australia, countries where you wouldn't expect foreign fighters to be coming from large numbers. And one of the issues that societies and governments are considering now is how do you respect the citizens' right to travel, while at the same time reducing likelihood that the citizens could travel in order to join a terrorist group. And that's something each sovereign country has to decide for itself what measures to put in place. Some countries, when the threshold of suspicion reaches a certain level, they're saying that the citizens is not going to be allowed to travel internationally. And that's a way to try to limit it. So I don't want to focus my answer only on the Nordic countries. I'd say on Western Europe, North America, Australia, those areas that really are surprising when you look at the numbers of foreign terrorists coming out of those regions. Since the economic collapse, how closely have you worked with Icelandic police? I'm going to be careful in what I'm saying now because I've been reading about the recovery in Iceland being quite strong in comparison to mainland Europe. So I'm hoping that the smiles I've seen since landing are smiles because economic recovery is being felt here. But we've been working with Icelandic police during my entire 14 years very closely. And one thing that's clear is when there are difficult economic times, sometimes economic crimes increase, and therefore the cooperation has to be quite close. And the consultation of our databases has been consistently high. And to be quite candid, the response of Interpol has been consistently low in terms of hits, that is, where people are being investigated in Iceland if they're not known to police anywhere else in the world. That means it comes back negative. That's a good thing. For a metal detection device and an airport, the goal is for the red light not to go off. And for Iceland, the consultations of our database for the most part results in good information that the people that they're investigating are not wanted for criminal conduct. But when they are, it's like finding a needle in a haystack. Interpol's response is they help Icelandic police. Well, if there are no further questions, Mr. Nopouls is, sorry. Before you ask this, this is my last press conference as Secretary-General in a member country. And this is true what I'm telling you. In every press interview I've ever held in any country, the last question has always been painful for me. Always, consistently. It's always that last question, so you can change the tide by asking a friendly question. This is a friendly question. What are you most proud of since you started the new office? Yeah, very good question. You can ask two questions. When I first became Secretary-General, we had only 179 countries, and only 163 of those countries were connected to our police communication system. We didn't have internet communication at all. It was really, really a closed, closed circle. And now, as I sit before you, any police officer in the world can be connected to Interpol by inserting a certain code, a certain number, by scanning a device, by using a laptop or any other computer terminal. So the connectivity is one thing I'm very excited about. In the beginning of my tenure as Secretary-General, we only reached a few thousand people per year, and we only had a few million searches per year. Now, last year, we had over a billion searches. And the final point that I'm most proud of is that you see me wearing this wristband called Turn Back Crime. So we started from a network of Interpol offices. We expanded to police around the world having access. And now we have this campaign where we're asking citizens around the world to help Interpol and police come up with ways that they can prevent crime. And the more that we do this, we're having had the support from His Holiness the Pope, Ban Ki-moon, we've got Leo Nel Messi, Juventus, Ferrari, and then we've got Shah Rukh Khan. And then we have these eighth graders and seventh graders and students from Singapore and around the world who are writing about ways in which their friends can stay safer on the internet. So the idea that Interpol will become a reality to individuals in the street, citizens, students, not just what they see in the movies or read in books, which I love, by the way, but a reality is probably what's made me proudest. On that note, thank you.