Transnational repression

Transnational repression is a type of political repression conducted by a state outside its borders. It often involves targeting political dissidents or critical members of diaspora communities abroad and can take the forms of assassinations and/or enforced disappearances of citizens, among others. 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 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.
Sociologist Dana M. Moss, who coined the term 'transnational repression' in 2016, categorized repression into six types:
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.
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.
During the United Nations Security Council briefing on 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 Canad andd the United Kingdom, describing the diversion as "a blatant act of transnational repression".
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 (MPS). 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 Xi Jinping at the APEC United States 2023 summit in San Francisco. The Index on Censorship has described 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 moths 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.
A report by Mohamed Soltan's nonprofit Freedom Initiative stated that Egypt has become "... more innovative and emboldened" in carrying out acts of transnational repression. Actions include targeting dissidents in the United States.
In 2023, the Sikh Coalition wrote to the United States government to warn about Indian transnational repression and rising Hindu nationalist threats in the US in the aftermath of the killing in Canada of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen. The Canadian government is investigating what it said were 'credible allegations of a potential link' in Nijjar's death to the Indian government.
On 9 November 2023, former European Parliament Vice-President Alejo Vidal-Quadras was shot in the face in Madrid, Spain, an attack that he survived. Iran was suspected to be related to the assassination attempt and the attack has been described as an act of transnational repression, including by the European Parliament. A United States Treasury Department press release declared that: "The [Ministry of Intelligence and Security] and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have long targeted perceived regime opponents in acts of transnational repression outside of Iran, a practice that the regime has accelerated in recent years." Freedom House also included journalist Masih Alinejad's kidnapping plan among Iran's transnational repression tactics.
As of 2024, Russia has focused its repression on anti-war and other political activists as well as journalists; it ranks among the most active perpetrators of transnational repression in the world. Russia has a history of transnational repression that was documented in the Tsarist regimes.
A report by Mohamed Soltan's nonprofit Freedom Initiative stated that, like Egypt, Saudi Arabia has become "... more innovative and emboldened" in carrying out acts of transnational repression. As of 2024, The Guardian reported Saudi Arabia as one of the major perpetrators of transnational repression in the world.
In June 2023, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe stated that Turkey's failure to ratify Sweden's NATO membership bid is part of its campaign of transnational repression. It called upon Turkey to end its intimidation of exiled journalist Bülent Keneş and to both recognise and respect the Swedish Supreme Court's decision not to extradite him.
In 2011, the United States assassinated US citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan in Yemen over their suspected affiliation with Al-Qaeda. al-Awlaki's 16 year old son Abdulrahman, also a US citizen, was killed in a separate strike weeks later. The question of the extrajudicial assassination of US citizens, as well as their indefinite military detention, has been debated by constitutional scholars and judges, with the difficulty of justifiably designating US citizens as enemy combatants due to the undefined nature of the War on Terror being a key point of contention. Supporters of the assassination and extrajudicial detention of US citizens in the War on Terror have argued that the expansion of presidential war powers in the 2001 AUMF and subsequent US court cases such as Hamdi v. Rumsfeld make these actions legal under US law, while critics such as Norman Pollack contend that the secrecy of the drone war makes it impossible for those without access to classified intelligence to adequately judge the ethics and legality of overseas killings.
J.D. Tuccille identified the grounding of Evo Morales' plane over Europe as an example of an attempt by the US and its allies at the transnational repression of Edward Snowden.
In December 2021, the US passed the Transnational Repression Accountability and Prevention (TRAP) Act as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022. The law aims to combat abuse of Interpol notices.
In March 2023, a bipartisan group of United States senators introduced the Transnational Repression Policy Act. The proposed law would mandate that the intelligence community identify and share information about perpetrators of transnational repression operating in the United States. In October 2023, the Government Accountability Office reported that the US does not have adequate laws to combat acts of transnational repression.