In July, China’s ‘Ethnic Unity Law’ came into effect, giving the authorities new powers to suppress dissent it deems a threat to national unity. Crucially, the law makes clear that China will target dissidents abroad, stating that individuals and groups outside the country may be held liable if they ‘undermine ethnic unity’ or ‘create ethnic division’. The law is the latest expression of transnational repression, a practice where China is the global leader.

A growing practice

Transnational repression is what happens when a government reaches beyond its borders to intimidate, punish and silence its citizens living elsewhere. Those targeted – civil society activists, dissidents, human rights defenders, journalists and members of the political opposition – have often gone into exile to continue work they can no longer do due to civic space restrictions at home. But repression follows them, aimed at stopping them speaking out, raising awareness of human rights violations and supporting those who remain in their home country.

And it’s on the rise. As civic space is increasingly restricted and more states slide towards authoritarianism, more people are forced into exile, and governments seek to silence them. Freedom House, which has recorded physical incidents of transnational repression since 2014, documented 126 new cases in 2025, bringing its running total to 1,375. At least 54 states have engaged in transnational repression, with six — Afghanistan, Benin, Georgia, Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe — identified as using these tactics for the first time in 2025.

Ten states account for over 70 per cent of all incidents, with China, Vietnam and Russia the three worst offenders. China is responsible for 319 recorded instances of physical transnational repression. It pursues Hong Kong democracy activists and Tibetans, Uyghurs and other minorities it regards as enemies of the state. Its campaign extends to Taiwanese civil society activists and elected officials, treated as Chinese nationals under its ‘One China’ principle, which views Taiwan not as an independent country but as a rebellious Chinese province.

China’s reach is wide. A university student was reportedly jailed for six years after returning home from Australia, where he took part in a protest. A dissident disappeared in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), likely kidnapped and returned to China.

China also uses its economic power to silence dissent far from home. In April, Zambia – a country that owes China billions of dollars – abruptly called off RightsCon, a global digital rights conference, evidently yielding to Chinese pressure over the participation of Taiwanese activists. In August, Chinese diplomatic pressure tried to force the cancellation of a human rights conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, when the Chinese Ambassador directly contacted the Argentine government over the scheduled participation of prominent exiled Uyghur activist Dolkun Isa. The city government cancelled the meeting venue, forcing it to take place at a different location.

Transnational violence

The most extreme expression of transnational repression is the murder of exiles. In June 2025, former Nicaraguan army major Roberto Samcam was shot dead at his home near San José, Costa Rica. Samcam was an outspoken critic of Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega and had lived in exile since fleeing repression in 2018. His killing was at least the third of a Nicaraguan exile in Costa Rica in recent years. Other Nicaraguan exiles living in the country have been shot at and beaten, and intelligence services have warned journalists that their lives are in danger. The message for the hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans in Costa Rica is clear: there’s no safety in exile, because the government they’ve fled can still reach them.

Under former President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela pursued its opponents abroad with similar determination. In October 2025, gunmen in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, opened fire on two exiled Venezuelan activists, Luis Peche and Yendri Velásquez. Velásquez was hit eight times and Peche six, but both somehow survived.

Repressive states are increasingly contracting out transnational violence, hiring organised crime syndicates to conduct assassinations abroad, a method that provides plausible deniability. In February 2024, men in fake police uniforms abducted exiled Venezuelan ex-army lieutenant Ronald Ojeda from his apartment in Santiago de Chile. His dismembered body was found in a suitcase buried under concrete nine days later. Chilean prosecutors concluded that the killing was politically motivated, ordered by the Venezuelan government and carried out by a Venezuelan gang. Chile has briefed the International Criminal Court on the case as part of its investigation into the Maduro government.

Iran has repeatedly used similar methods. In March 2025, a New York jury convicted two members of an Eastern European crime ring hired by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard for a 2022 plot to kill exiled journalist Masih Alinejad at her Brooklyn home. Another plot to kill her during a speaking engagement at Fairfield University in Connecticut was run by an Iranian operative who recruited two US men to carry out the assassination through criminal contacts. In the UK, two Romanian nationals were convicted of a knife attack on exiled Iranian television presenter Pouria Zeraati. Prosecutors established that they were hired criminal proxies for the Iranian regime.

India has faced similar accusations. US prosecutors indicted an Indian national who worked with a former Indian intelligence officer to hire an assassin to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh separatist leader in New York. The plot was foiled when the hitman turned out to be an undercover agent. The indictment tied the plot to the June 2023 killing of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, shot dead outside a temple in British Columbia, Canada.

Surveillance and intimidation

Before repression turns physical, states watch, intimidate and threaten exiles, including through their families at home. An International Consortium of Investigative Journalists investigation based on interviews with 105 Chinese exiles targeted for transnational repression across 23 countries found that half had seen relatives in China interrogated or intimidated by the authorities, often within hours of taking part in a protest abroad. In February, the father of exiled Hong Kong activist Anna Kwok received an eight-month sentence for violating national security laws after trying to cash in his daughter’s education savings insurance policy.

Many other authoritarian regimes routinely use similar tactics. In Belarus, state security forces have carried out mass raids, asset seizures and forced televised confessions targeting the families of exiled opposition figures. Egyptian authorities have long raided homes and arbitrarily detained family members of campaigners based abroad, such as US-based activist Mohamed Soltan. In 2017, Bahrain imprisoned several close relatives of London-based human rights activist Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei in direct retaliation for his protests against the Bahraini king’s visit to the UK. Tajikistan and Uzbekistan routinely freeze bank accounts of exiled dissidents, conduct aggressive interrogations of their relatives and target their children and grandchildren by expelling them from universities, subjecting them to classroom harassment and blocking them from travelling abroad to attend school.

Targeting of families is often combined with other tactics. Saudi Arabia imprisons family members, imposes indefinite travel bans and deploys military-grade spyware against overseas critics. The Chinese government uses financial pressure, from freezing pensions to blocking bank accounts at home, to coerce those who flee, and has begun issuing exiled Hong Kong activists with spurious tax demands. Financial coercion is combined with surveillance and threats against exiled activists. When China’s President Xi Jinping visited France in May 2024, Uyghur activists who held a protest reported being attacked, threatened and placed under surveillance, and accused the Chinese embassy of orchestrating the repression.

Iran’s theocratic regime uses a similar set of tactics, pursuing exiles by confiscating their assets and threatening their relatives at home. Staff at BBC Persian in the UK have reported that family members in Iran have been detained to punish them. The trend has intensified during the country’s war with Israel and the USA.

The experience of exiled Iranians in the UK, once a relatively safe haven for political dissidents, is part of a broader pattern. Alongside China and Iran, states including Bahrain, Egypt, Eritrea, Pakistan, Russia and Rwanda have repeatedly deployed coercive tactics on British soil. These include direct physical assaults, spyware, predatory lawfare and the detention and intimidation of relatives back home.

Bounties, Red Notices and cancelled passports

Authoritarian states routinely turn international administrative and legal machinery against exiled critics. In 2023, Hong Kong police placed bounties of around US$130,000 on eight exiled pro-democracy figures, including former student leader Nathan Law, with Hong Kong’s leader John Lee vowing they’d be pursued for life. Authorities added six more names to the bounty list in December 2024 and 19 more in July 2025.

Autocracies systematically exploit Interpol’s global alert system to target dissidents. There are dozens of documented instances of states weaponising Red Notices – global alerts that request but don’t mandate arrests – against political opponents. Aysoltan Niyazova, a Turkmen activist and member of the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot, was subject to Red Notices for 24 years and repeatedly detained as a result before Interpol finally intervened to remove her from the list in February. In March 2025, Sudan’s Red Notice against Yassir Arman, a prominent political opposition figure, led to him being stopped at Nairobi airport in Kenya until authorities recognised the political nature of the alert and let him go.

The government of El Salvador has issued Red Notices against human rights lawyers living in exile in Spain, though condemnation from United Nations (UN) human rights experts forced Interpol to withdraw the alerts. Systems to prevent abuse remain weak. Despite Interpol’s announcement of improved vetting protocols following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, around 90 per cent of notices submitted by Russia over the following two years received initial approval.

Beyond policing alerts, authoritarian regimes increasingly use bureaucratic disenfranchisement and denationalisation to punish exiles. In 2024, Hong Kong authorities invoked national security powers to cancel the passports of exiled activists, including people based in Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA. Iran has also revoked the citizenship of exiles. Egypt weaponises consular bureaucracy, denying passport renewals and withholding birth certificates to leave exiles functionally stateless. In 2023, Nicaragua enacted constitutional and legal changes that allowed it to formally strip over 300 journalists, political opponents and expelled political prisoners of their citizenship. Alongside the loss of nationality, the government ordered the immediate confiscation of all local assets and properties of those targeted.

Cross-border collaboration

Authoritarian states are increasingly collaborating to capture and return exiles to countries where they’re certain to face detention and violence. Forced returns violate the principle of non-refoulement, which forbids sending people to countries where they risk persecution or torture, under the Refugee Convention and the Convention Against Torture.

Collaboration is clear in Southeast Asia, with Thailand a major hub. In 2025, Thai authorities deported 40 Uyghur men to China, where they face severe persecution, after holding them in immigration detention for over a decade. Thailand also forcibly returned Vietnamese human rights activist Y Quynh Bdap to face terrorism charges despite his official status as a refugee recognised by the UN, and it routinely detains Chinese dissidents and forces Cambodian opposition figures back across the border.

Repressive African regimes are increasingly collaborating to silence dissent, often trading favours with neighbouring states and exploiting weak asylum protections. In 2026, Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan called for closer cooperation with Kenya to curb cross-border activism she portrayed as disruptive.

Kenya has become a hotspot. In 2024, Kenyan officials helped Ugandan agents abduct Ugandan opposition leader Kizza Besigye in Nairobi, forcing him back to face trial in a military court. Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit, a whistleblower with dual Kenyan and South Sudanese citizenship, was abducted in Kenya in June. In January 2025, Tanzanian security forces abducted exiled activist Maria Sarungi Tsehai in Nairobi, assaulted her and tried to unlock her phone. Months later, Tanzanian officers detained and tortured Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi and Ugandan lawyer Agather Atuhaire after they arrived in Tanzania to observe an opposition leader’s trial. Kenya has also expelled foreign rights workers, including Ugandan legal adviser Martin Mavenjina, over their advocacy.

In May 2025, Tanzanian authorities arrested and deported Abdousalam Ibrahim Mpingou, an activist from Comoros living in Tanzania, over his social media posts critical of the Comoros government. In West Africa, agents from Benin kidnapped digital activist Steve Amoussou from exile in Togo, while authorities in Côte d’Ivoire arrested journalist Comlan Hugues Sossoukpè and sent him back to Benin despite his refugee status.

Middle Eastern and North African states increasingly use bilateral and multilateral security channels to repress exiled dissidents. In December 2024, Lebanese authorities arrested Egyptian-Turkish poet and dissident Abdulrahman Yusuf al-Qaradawi as he returned from Syria in response to a provisional arrest request from Egypt. While he was in custody, the UAE filed an extradition request through the Arab Interior Ministers Council, citing a social media post in which al-Qaradawi criticised Emirati authorities and celebrated the fall of Syria’s Assad regime. Despite a pending appeal before Lebanon’s top administrative court, the Lebanese government extradited him to the UAE in January 2025, even though he isn’t an Emirati citizen and wasn’t on Emirati soil when the alleged offence occurred. UAE authorities have since held him largely incommunicado.

Following a similar pattern, Emirati dissident Jasem Al-Shamsi was arrested in Syria in November 2025 and transferred to an undisclosed location shortly after the UAE placed him on a domestic terrorism list and sentenced him in absentia. He remains forcibly disappeared.

In May, Saudi Arabia arrested Kuwaiti opposition figure Waleed Al-Tabtabaie and handed him back to Kuwait, where he’d been convicted in absentia over criticism of the country’s rulers. That same month, authorities in Oman detained Egyptian dissident Mariam Abdelbasette at a hospital, days after she gave birth, on the basis of what her lawyers say was a fabricated Interpol Red Notice. She and her baby were released following an international outcry, but her husband, Ahmed Mousa, had already been forcibly deported to Egypt and imprisoned. The Gulf Centre for Human Rights has documented over 20 such cases linked to seven states — Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE — between 2022 and 2026.

Turkey has ignored domestic judicial injunctions and deported Russian anti-war activists to Russia and Turkmen dissident bloggers to Turkmenistan. Kazakhstan continues to arrest and extradite activists to Uzbekistan.

Belarus and Russia, meanwhile, appear to be moving against each other’s targets. In August 2025, Belarusian dissident Anatol Kotau, wanted in Russia, disappeared after a ship he boarded in Turkey was intercepted by the Russian coastguard and diverted to the Russian-backed breakaway region of Abkhazia. He hasn’t been heard from since. Two Belarusian nationals were briefly detained over the June 2026 fatal shooting of exiled Russian artist and dissident Robert Kuzovkov near Poland’s border with Belarus. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk stated that the incident bore the hallmarks of a political killing.

A shrinking safe zone

Democratic states are no longer safe havens for people fleeing authoritarian rule. On top of failing to do enough to prevent transnational repression on their soil, many are enabling it through their border and immigration systems, as geopolitical calculations and political pressure to curb immigration numbers trump human rights protections.

In June, Germany returned Tajik opposition activist Asadullo Boboev and his 19-year-old son despite a documented risk of arrest. Tajik authorities detained Boboev the moment he landed. He was the fourth activist Germany has deported to face immediate detention in Tajikistan since 2023.

The US government has repeatedly returned Russians to face the authoritarian government they fled. In July 2025, a court in the Russian city of Perm charged opposition activist Leonid Melekhin with ‘justifying terrorism’ immediately after the USA deported him. Weeks later, Russian authorities jailed army deserter Artyom Vovchenko on arrival in Moscow following his deportation from the USA.

US immigration authorities have also deported dozens of detained Iranian asylum seekers after letting Iranian consular officials into detention facilities to help process them. Those deported on chartered flights to a country where they could face the death penalty include Christian converts and women’s rights protesters.

On top of this, the Trump administration’s 2025 dismantling of USAID and freeze on State Department democracy funding cut off money that had helped threatened activists relocate and rebuild their lives abroad, pushing many organisations that support exiles towards financial collapse.

There are, more positively, instances in which courts and governments have held perpetrators to account. UK and US courts convicted those behind the plots against Masih Alinejad and Pouria Zeraati. In June, a UK court convicted a former Border Force officer and a retired Hong Kong police officer of spying on UK-based Hong Kong democracy activists. In March 2025, the USA applied visa bans on current and former Thai officials responsible for or complicit in Thailand’s forced return of Uyghurs to China. These moves offered a welcome break from the tendency of global north democracies to condemn transnational repression without penalising perpetrators.

After Nicaragua stripped hundreds of exiled dissidents of citizenship, several states, including Chile and Spain, immediately stepped up to grant them nationality. But such responses remain the exception. When they offer some protection, host governments tend to concentrate help on a small circle of high-profile figures, leaving most exiles to manage their own security.

Hard-won protections may also be reversible. Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the UK and the USA suspended extradition cooperation with Hong Kong in 2020 when it introduced a draconian national security law. In 2025, however, the UK reversed course, reopening the door to extraditions on a ‘case-by-case basis’. Exiled activists, some with bounties on their heads, condemned this as a betrayal of the roughly 200,000 Hong Kongers who resettled in the UK trusting they’d be protected.

Growing recognition

As the problem has grown, so has its recognition. The European Parliament, the G7 and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have all formally acknowledged transnational repression as an assault on human rights and national sovereignty. But recognition hasn’t translated into stronger responses. According to the International Partnership for Human Rights, the European Union’s Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime is poorly suited to tackling transnational repression, as it only applies to serious violations such as killing and torture, while most transnational repression works through subtler means.

Exiled communities have largely filled the gap themselves. Some, such as the Belarusian Solidarity Center in Poland, offer newly arrived activists practical support, including help finding housing, legal orientation and safety planning. Others focus on documenting abuses back home, gathering testimony and evidence that those who’ve stayed can no longer safely collect, as Mexico-based Justicia 11J does for Cuba. Some, including the Hong Kong Democracy Council in Washington, DC, advocate with host governments, pressing for sanctions, visa protections and formal recognition of the threat.

But this work depends on funding that can vanish overnight. The multi-donor Lifeline fund, which once supported embattled civil society organisations, shut down in 2025. And civil society, however well organised, has no power to stop a hostile government’s intelligence services from operating on foreign soil, or to compel governments to act against them. As transnational repression tactics sharpen and intensify, democratic states must live up to their human rights commitments and do everything they can to ensure that exile means safety.

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