Freedom House Introduction Detainees stand behind bars at an immigration detention centre in Bangkok on January 21, 2019, during a visit organized by authorities for journalists. Image credit: Romeo Gacad/AFP via Getty Images. A n Iranian journalist in Europe wakes up and opens a spear-phishing email on his phone. The family of a Uighur woman in Canada is put in a labor camp in China; when they are released, they call and warn their exiled daughter to keep quiet as a Chinese official looks on. A Russian man who fled to the United States after 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 Tajik opposition activist applies for asylum in Austria but is deported to Tajikistan based on a Tajik government request; when he returns, he is tortured and imprisoned. 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 agents asphyxiate and dismember a US-based Saudi journalist inside the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul. All of these are real examples of “transnational repression,” in which governments reach across national borders to silence dissent among diaspora and exile communities. They are emblematic of an enormous and growing threat to people all over the world who are struggling for democracy, or just exercising their basic human rights. Authoritarian states large and small are employing a variety of aggressive tactics to control their citizens, or sometimes even foreign nationals, residing abroad. This report is the product of an effort to understand the scale and scope of transnational repression by compiling cases from public sources, including UN and government documents, human rights reports, and credible media outlets. The goal is to generate a detailed picture of a global phenomenon, specifying who is doing what to whom and where. freedomhouse.org 3