The Palestinian Authority will use its recently-granted membership of Interpol — the global association of national police forces headquartered in the French city of Lyon — to both pursue its political war against Israel and harass domestic opponents of its policies, the author of a new report on the issue warned on Friday.

The decision at Interpol’s General Assembly in September 2017 to grant membership to the PA was a “serious error,” Ted R. Bromund — a senior research fellow at the Washington, DC-based Heritage Foundation — told The Algemeiner.

Earlier this week, Bromund published his extensive report on the implications of Interpol’s decision to admit the PA — itself indicative, he wrote, of “a diplomatic defeat for the United States” stemming from “the US failure to recognize that Interpol, founded as an apolitical association of police organizations, is becoming a body through which other nations pursue political agendas.”

“The PA sought Interpol membership as part of its broader political war with Israel,” Bromund said. “Palestinian spokesmen have also made it clear that they intended to abuse Interpol by using it to harass their Palestinian opponents.”

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In his report, Bromund highlighted several potentially grave consequences that could arise from the PA’s Interpol membership, among them the arrest and extradition of Israeli officials to the West Bank or to the International Criminal Court. Bromund stressed that “the most likely targets are in fact Palestinian opponents of the Palestinian Authority.”

“The Palestinian Authority is now just one of the many authoritarians in Interpol, and it will side with them when they abuse Interpol, as Turkey has to harass German citizens of Turkish descent,” Bromund observed.

“Opposing Palestinian membership of Interpol is about pushing back against the rising power of the authoritarians and their perversion of international organizations,” he added.

Bromund pointed to a number of immediate options available to the US government to register its objections to Palestinian membership of Interpol — such as blocking PA access to the data the US supplies to Interpol and opposing, as a matter of policy, all PA requests made through the global agency’s auspices.