DEFENDING DEMOCRACY IN EXILE Policy Responses to Transnational Repression • The criminalization of gathering information about individuals, especially members of diasporas, for the intended benefit of a foreign state provides law enforcement agencies with tools to address the problem of transnational repression directly. • Official recognition that one of the groups most targeted by transnational repression, Uyghurs from China, face collective persecution allows authorities to remove the burden of demonstrating individual persecution during the asylum-seeking process. The issuance of guidance to asylum case officers on other groups that are commonly targeted by transnational repression similarly streamlines the process. Introduction T umso Abdurakhmanov, a critic of the repressive regime in Russia’s Chechen Republic, moved to a small town in Sweden in early 2020, seeking safety from Chechen authorities who were threatening his life. A few months later, a man with a hammer showed up at his apartment while he slept. In a grainy video shot on his phone, Abdurakhmanov recorded his attacker, disarmed and bleeding from the head, as he explained how he was sent to Sweden to silence the activist by men from Grozny, the Chechen capital.1 In 2021, the attacker and a female accomplice were convicted of attempted murder by a district court in Gävle.2 They repeated their claims about who had hired them, placing responsibility for the attack on Chechen authorities. Despite Sweden’s reputation as a safe haven, many political exiles and foreign dissidents have come under attack after relocating to the country. In the early 1990s, several ethnic Kurdish dissidents from Iran were assassinated in Sweden, most likely by agents of the Iranian state, which was conducting a campaign of assassinations across Europe at the time.3 In 1985, a defector from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s government was murdered in a hotel while living in exile in Sweden.4 More recently, members of the Iranian, Uyghur, Turkish, Eritrean, Rwandan, and Tibetan diasporas in Sweden have been surveilled and targeted by agents of foreign governments.5 Sweden is unique among democratic states in its level of official awareness regarding the threat of transnational repression. The government views malign acts by foreign states against dissidents as a serious danger to the democratic fabric of the country, and such acts are addressed through criminal prosecution under a special espionage law. Yet broader foreign policy efforts to ensure accountability for foreign states remain largely absent. In the field of migration, although the country is known for both protection and inclusiveness, since 2016 it has sought to discourage asylum seeking and increased the use of temporary protection. The migration service’s reliance on unvetted translators has introduced opportunities for intimidation and coercion within the migration and asylum processes. Suggested citation: Yana Gorokhovskaia and Isabel Linzer, “Case Study: Sweden,” in Defending Democracy in Exile: Policy Responses to Transnational Repression (Washington, DC: Freedom House, June 2022), https://freedomhouse.org/report/transnational-repression/sweden. 2 @FreedomHouse #TransnationalRepression