OUT OF SIGHT, NOT OUT OF REACH: THE GLOBAL SCALE AND SCOPE OF TRANSNATIONAL REPRESSION February 2021 Executive Summary Rwandan opposition leader and former prime minister Faustin Twagiramungu speaks at an electoral rally in Gisenyi after returning from eight years of exile. Image credit: MARCO LONGARI/AFP via Getty Images. T his 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 freedomhouse.org 1