Transnational repression
Transnational repression is a type of state-led political repression conducted across national borders, in which governments target individuals through tactics such as surveillance, harassment, intimidation, assassinations, and enforced disappearances. Freedom House has documented its rise worldwide in recent years. Incidents that occur in the United States have been investigated by such agencies as the FBI.
International relations scholar Laurie Brand asserts that autocracies face specific challenges and opportunities in the international sphere that affect authoritarian practices. Specifically, the rise of transnationalism and practices that transcend national borders have led autocracies to develop strategies aiming to manage their citizens' migration. According to the political scientist Gerasimos Tsourapas, global autocracies engage in complex strategies of transnational repression, legitimation, and co-optation, as well as cooperation with non-state actors. Countries with more robust democracies are much less likely to pursue transnational repression. Some of these countries have been criticized for not doing enough to protect foreign nationals living in their countries. Cooperation between countries has been more common when the two countries have had close economic ties.
The New York Times reported that the frequency of cases of transnational repression worldwide seems to be increasing as of 2024, due in part to some authoritarian governments responding to how globalization and the internet allow for more communication across countries. While this term is relatively new, such repressive actions have been documented for decades. According to a February 2025 report by Freedom House, the People's Republic of China is responsible for about 22 percent of all cases of transnational repression, followed by Turkey, Tajikistan, Russia, Egypt, and Cambodia.
Typology of transnational repression
Dana M. Moss, who coined the term 'transnational repression' in 2016, categorized repression into six types:| Lethal retribution | The actual or attempted assassinations of dissidents abroad by regime agents or proxies. |
| Threats | Verbal or written warnings directed to members of the diaspora, including the summoning of individuals by regime officials to their embassies for this purpose. |
| Surveillance | The gathering and sending of information about co-nationals to the state security apparatus by informant networks composed of regime agents, loyalists, and coerced individuals. |
| Exile | The direct and indirect banishment of dissidents from the home country, including when the threat of physical confinement and harm prevents activists from returning. |
| Withdrawing scholarships | The rescinding of students' state benefits for refusing to participate in regime-mandated actions or organizations abroad. |
| Proxy punishment | The harassment, physical confinement, and/or bodily harm of relatives in the home-country as a means of information-gathering and retribution against dissidents abroad. |
According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, transnational repression can take place in multiple interconnected ways, leading to threats and actions against targets in foreign countries involving local actors or authorities in those locations. Prevalent tactics are:
- Acts of violence and intimidation outside the country
- Harassment through extradition requests, unlawful arrests or deportations
- Abuses of laws with extraterritorial provisions
- Impediments to mobility
- Digital threats or attacks
- Proxy punishment of in-country relatives or associates
History
Soviet Union
Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov was assassinated on a London street via a micro-engineered pellet that might have contained ricin. Contemporary newspaper accounts reported that he had been stabbed in the leg with an umbrella delivering a poisoned pellet, wielded by someone associated with the Bulgarian Secret Service. Annabel Markov recalled her husband's view about the umbrella, telling the BBC's Panorama programme, in April 1979, "He felt a jab in his thigh. He looked around and there was a man behind him who'd apologized and dropped an umbrella. I got the impression as he told the story that the jab hadn't been inflicted by the umbrella but that the man had dropped the umbrella as cover to hide his face." It was reported after the fall of the Soviet Union that the Soviet KGB had assisted the Bulgarian Secret Service.Chile
In 1976, Orlando Letelier was assassinated in a planted car bombing orchestrated in broad daylight within the US capital city of Washington, D.C. Letelier was an exiled former government official of Salvador Allende's democratically elected socialist government which had been ousted three years prior in the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. The murder was carried out by the military regime's secret police as part of its policy of targeting and silencing political opposition, with the intent of dearticulating potential resistance to the military order not just from within Chile but also from those nationals who might exercise and advocate for dissident pressure abroad. The assassination became one of many exemplary cases of the extensive violent political repression carried out by right-wing military juntas of South America during the Cold War under the umbrella of Operation Condor.Governments accused
By 2024, some 44 countries have been documented as committing transnational repression, according to Freedom House. The organization noted that it has become a more common practice worldwide. According to a February 2025 report by Freedom House, China is responsible for about 22 percent of all cases of transnational repression, followed by Turkey, Tajikistan, Russia, Egypt, Cambodia, Turkmenistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, and Belarus.A 2024 Human Rights Watch report documented 75 cases between 2009 and 2024, which were committed by more than two dozen governments, including Algeria, Bahrain, Belarus, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, South Sudan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, and the UAE.
Countries with more robust democracies are much less likely to pursue transnational repression. Some have been criticised for not doing enough to protect foreign nationals or people of the diasporas living in their countries. Cooperation between countries was more common when the two countries had close economic ties. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed a resolution on October 1, 2024, that defended Julian Assange for his 'journalistic work' and reiterated its condemnation of all forms and practices of transnational repression.
Belarus
During the United Nations Security Council briefing in October 2022 on the ICAO report about Belarus' diversion of Ryanair Flight 4978, after whose landing opposition activist and journalist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega were arrested by Belarusian authorities, the United States ambassador to the UN for Special Political Affairs, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, described the act as a violation of international aviation law and of transnational repression. The United States Mission to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe further delivered a statement on behalf of its country, as well as Canada and the United Kingdom, describing the diversion as "a blatant act of transnational repression".China
The Center for American Progress reported in 2022 that some of the most notable transnational repression efforts of the government of the People's Republic of China, such as the Causeway Bay Books disappearances, have been coordinated by the Ministry of Public Security. The report called for initiatives to better understand the MPS's activities overseas.In July 2023, the United States Department of State classified the Hong Kong Police Force's bounties on eight prominent dissidents living abroad as an instance of "transnational repression efforts".
In April 2023, the United States Department of Justice indicted Chinese operatives for crimes related to a transnational repression campaign using a Chinese police overseas service station in Manhattan. Following the indictments, the FBI described seeing an "inflection point in the tactics and tools and the level of risk and the level of threat" in transnational repression.
In March 2022, United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken characterized the Chinese government's attempts to silence Uyghur activists outside its borders as part of a campaign of transnational repression. A 2023 report published by the University of Sheffield called for increased use of Magnitsky legislation in response to the transnational repression of the Uyghur diaspora. This repression has increased in 2024 according to some Uyghur exiles.
In 2023, The Washington Post reported that China supported violent counterprotestors who attempted to silence criticism of General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping at the APEC United States 2023 summit in San Francisco. The Index on Censorship has described the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government's attempts to censor artist Badiucao's overseas exhibitions as an example of transnational repression.
As of 2024, Chinese students studying abroad who engaged in political activism against the regime faced harassment and retribution directly or through family members living in China. In 2019, a student was jailed for six months when he returned to China over tweets he had posted while studying at the University of Minnesota in the US; a Chinese district court held that the tweets "defaced the image of the country's leaders" and sentenced the student "for provocation".
In February 2025, Thailand deported 40 male Uyghur asylum seekers back to China. While other countries offered resettlement, Thailand confirmed that sending the Uyghurs elsewhere could risk retaliation from China.