DEFENDING DEMOCRACY IN EXILE Policy Responses to Transnational Repression Introduction O n 2 October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and long-time critic of Saudi Arabia’s government who had been living in exile in the United States, walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in order to obtain paperwork necessary to get married. He never came back out. A month later, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan unambiguously identified the party responsible for Khashoggi’s murder in the pages of The Washington Post: “We know the order to kill Khashoggi came from the highest levels of the Saudi government.” 1 Dissidents fleeing repression in Central Asia, Egypt, Russia, Iran, and China face the risk of assassination, assault, detention, and rendition in Turkey. There is an irony to the fact that one of the most well-known acts of transnational repression took place in Turkey, itself a notorious perpetrator of transnational repression that has undertaken a global campaign to forcefully return dozens of individuals from around the world through rendition.2 And although Khashoggi’s assassination attracted worldwide attention to the lethal ways in which modern authoritarian states pursue critics across borders, he was not the first nor the last to be targeted by a foreign state inside Turkey. Freedom House has documented 56 incidents of physical transnational repression that took place inside the country from 2014 to 2021. Dissidents fleeing repression in Central Asia, Egypt, Russia, Iran, and China have made their home in Turkey for decades, but many continue to face the risk of assassination, assault, detention, and rendition. Turkey has demonstrated the ability to respond effectively to the threat of transnational repression on its soil. However, the degree and nature of the response is largely driven by foreign policy considerations. When the origin state using transnational repression is an adversary, Turkey protects the targeted and punishes the perpetrators. When the origin state is a friendly nation, Turkey silences activism and endangers the already vulnerable. In the migration field, Turkey has tried to bestow legal protections on members of diasporas with whom it shares close religious and cultural links, most prominently the Uyghurs. This protection, however, is not comprehensive and Uyghurs continue to find themselves in a precarious position as legal residents but not citizens of Turkey. Migrants from other potentially targeted diasporas are forced to contend with Turkey’s overwhelmed and ad hoc migration system that offers few systematic mechanisms for protecting people against refoulement— returning them to a country where there is reason to believe they would face persecution. Suggested citation: Yana Gorokhovskaia and Isabel Linzer, “Case Study: Turkey,” in Defending Democracy in Exile: Policy Responses to Transnational Repression (Washington, DC: Freedom House, June 2022), https://freedomhouse.org/report/transnational-repression/turkey-host. 2 @FreedomHouse #TransnationalRepression