Out of Sight, Not Out of Reach

What is Transnational Repression?

It is governments reaching across borders to silence dissent among diasporas and exiles, including through assassinations, illegal deportations, abductions, digital threats, Interpol abuse, and family intimidation.

It is a daily assault on civilians everywhere — including in democracies like the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and Australia.

The Tactics of Transnational Repression

Authoritarian countries are silencing exiles and diasporas with tactics of fear and repression.

These tactics violate exiles’ fundamental rights and undermine the rule of law in host countries.

A Tajik opposition activist applies for asylum but is deported from Austria to Tajikistan, where he is tortured and imprisoned.

An Iranian journalist in Europe wakes up and opens his phone to a stream of death threats from Iran.

The family of a Uighur in Canada is put in a labor camp in China—when the family gets out, they call and warn their exiled daughter to keep quiet while a Chinese official looks on.

A Russian man who fled to the United States when security services stole his business is held on a frivolous Interpol notice and kept in US immigration detention for a year and a half.

A Rwandan opposition leader is abducted while in transit through the United Arab Emirates and reappears three days later in Kigali, facing trial for “terrorism.”

A Turkish teacher is pulled off the streets of Kosovo and bundled onto an airplane to Turkey.

Saudi officials asphyxiate and dismember a Saudi journalist inside the country’s consulate in Istanbul.
 
All of these are examples of “transnational repression,” or countries targeting their diasporas and exiles abroad in order to silence them. All of these are real events that happened in the last six years, emblematic of an enormous and growing threat to activists, journalists, and migrants the world over. All over the world, states are employing a diverse and aggressive toolbox of tactics to control their citizens, or sometimes even non-citizens, abroad.

This report is the product of an effort to understand the scale and scope of “transnational repression,” in which governments reach across national borders to silence dissent among their diaspora and exile communities. Freedom House assembled cases of transnational repression from public sources, including UN and government documents, human rights reports, and credible news outlets, in order to generate a detailed picture of this global phenomenon.

The project compiled a catalogue of 608 direct, physical cases of transnational repression since 2014. In each incident, the origin country’s authorities physically reached an individual living abroad, whether through detention, assault, physical intimidation, unlawful deportation, rendition, or suspected assassination. The list includes 31 origin states conducting physical transnational repression in 79 host countries. This total is certainly only partial; hundreds of other physical cases that lacked sufficient documentation, especially detentions and unlawful deportations, are not included in Freedom House’s count. Nevertheless, even this conservative enumeration shows that what often appear to be isolated incidents—an assassination here, a kidnapping there—in fact represent a pernicious and pervasive threat to human freedom and security.

Moreover, physical transnational repression is only the tip of the iceberg. The consequences of each physical attack ripple out into a larger community. And beyond the physical cases compiled for this report are the much more widespread tactics of “everyday” transnational repression: digital threats, spyware, and coercion by proxy, such as the imprisonment of exiles’ families. For millions of people around the world, transnational repression has become not an exceptional tool, but a common and institutionalized practice used by dozens of regimes to control people outside their borders.

Freedom House’s research shows that:

• Transnational repression is becoming a “normal” phenomenon. The global review identified more governments, using the same tools, in more incidents than is typically understood. The states that run transnational repression campaigns deploy a broad spectrum of tactics against their perceived enemies, from spyware and family intimidation to renditions or assassinations.
• Most physical transnational repression involves co-opting host governments in order to reach exiles. The most common forms of transnational repression—detentions and unlawful deportations at the origin state’s request—entail exploitation of the host country’s institutions. Most renditions also involve working closely with host country authorities to illegally transfer people to the origin country. In this way, transnational repression directly undermines the rule of law in the targeted host country.
• The consequences for transnational repression are currently insufficient to deter further abuse. Stopping transnational repression will require reestablishing international norms that support universal due process and punish extraterritorial violence.
• The full spectrum of transnational repression tactics matters. Online harassment, coercion by proxy, mobility controls, and use of spyware do not garner the same level of attention as assassinations, but these less visible forms of transnational repression are intimately connected to physical attacks. Any effective response to transnational repression needs to address this continuum of practices.

The report consists of an introduction, a description of the methods of transnational repression, case studies on six states—China, Rwanda, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—conducting significant transnational repression campaigns, regional summaries covering countries not in the case studies, and recommendations.

Freedom House’s recommendations focus on what policymakers can do to hold perpetrators accountable for transnational repression and increase resilience within democracies.

Consistent accountability, especially in the form of targeted sanctions, will raise the cost of transnational repression for the regimes in question. Resilience efforts, especially measures that reduce opportunities for authoritarian states to manipulate institutions within democracies, will make it harder to attack exiles and diaspora communities in practice.

A thorough approach to resilience must include the recognition that excessively harsh policies intended to deter migrants and asylum seekers facilitate the external exploitation of a host country’s institutions, making it more likely that a persecuted individual will be denied asylum, deported, or otherwise mistreated. In order to proactively counter transnational repression, host countries should build trust with migrants through sustained outreach that informs them about their rights and the resources available to protect them.

Transnational repression is a serious threat to human rights and to democracy around the world, but with accountability for perpetrators and compassion for its targets, it can be stopped.