AS/Jur (2023) 17 b. co-opting other countries, which is a situation where states manipulate other states “to act against a target through detention, unlawful deportation, and other types of forced renditions, which are authorized through pro forma but meaningless legal procedures”; c. mobility controls are defined as tactics including “passport cancellation and denial of consular services, preventing the target from travelling or causing them to be detained”; d. threats from a distance include “online intimidation or surveillance and coercion by proxy, in which a person’s family, loved one, or business partner is threatened, imprisoned, or otherwise targeted”.4 8. Freedom House catalogued 608 direct, physical cases of transnational repression that occurred in the period from January 2014 through November 2020, drawing a list of 31 persecuting states conducting physical transnational repression in 79 host countries. In each incident, the persecuting state’s authorities physically reached an individual settled abroad, whether through detention, assault, physical intimidation, unlawful deportation, rendition, or even assassination.5 According to its most recent update published in April 2023, the number of incidents of physical transnational repression committed since 2014 has gone up to 854. These were committed by 38 governments in 91 countries around the world. In 2022, Freedom House recorded 79 incidents committed by 20 governments. According to Freedom House, the most prolific perpetrators of transnational repression are the governments of China, Türkiye, Russia, Egypt and Tajikistan. 6 9. Yet, this is only a partial account of the cases of transnational repression. Hundreds of other cases still lack sufficient documentation, especially detentions in the countries of persecution after unlawful deportations, digital harassment, secret surveillance, etc. Even if cases often appear to be isolated incidents — a suspicious assassination here, a kidnapping there — transnational repression is becoming a “normal” phenomenon, which represents a growing threat to human rights, security and the rule of law in host countries. 10. Physical transnational repression is only the tip of the iceberg. Beyond the physical cases recorded in Freedom House’s database, there are much more widespread tactics of “everyday” transnational repression: digital threats, spyware, coercion by proxy, imprisonment or persecution of the exiles’ families living in the states of origin, etc.7 Citizen Lab reported an increasing trend of using digital technologies as new tools to control, silence, and punish dissent across borders. 8 This phenomenon is known as “digital transnational repression”, of which the use of the Pegasus spyware is the most prominent example. 9 The misuse on politically motivated grounds of interstate legal assistance mechanisms such as anti-money laundering and anti-terror financing measures is also a form of transnational repression, which may have far-reaching consequences for the individuals targeted including asset freezing, financial exclusion and violation of property rights.10 11. The United States was the first to address the phenomenon of transnational repression at the legislative level and through consistent law enforcement practices. The FBI defined it as harassment and intimidation by some countries of their own citizens living in the U.S., targeting naturalized or U.S.-born citizens who have family overseas or other foreign connections, in violation of U.S. law and individual rights and freedoms. Transnational repression might take the forms of stalking, harassment, hacking, assaults, attempted kidnapping, forcing or coercing the victim to return to the home country, threatening or detaining family members in the home country, freezing financial assets, online disinformation campaigns, etc. 11 In 2019, the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the U.S. Helsinki Commission of the U.S. 4 Freedom House, I. Linzer and N. Schenkkan, Out of Sight, Not Out of Reach (2021); N. Al-Jizawi et al., Psychological and Emotional War Digital Transnational Repression in Canada (2022). 5 Freedom House, Linzer and Schenkkan, 2021, op.cit. 6 Freedom House, Y. Gorokhovskaia, N. Schenkkan and G. Vaughan, Still Not Safe: Transnational Repression in 2022, 2023. 7 N. Schenkkan et al., Perspectives on “Everyday” Transnational Repression in an Age of Globalization (2020) 30. 8 Al-Jizawi et al. supra footnote 4. 9 See Mr Pieter Omtzigt (Netherlands, EPP), “Pegasus and similar spyware and secret state surveillance”, Introductory memorandum, 8 April 2022. 10 See motion for a resolution, Doc. 15697. See also Shorazova v. Malta, No. 51853/19, 3 March 2022. 11 Transnational Repression — FBI 8