Freedom House voices at international forums, just as they would with perceived opponents in a diaspora community. That the United Nations has an entire workstream dedicated to documenting reprisals against people who cooperate with UN mechanisms demonstrates the seriousness of the problem. The assistant secretary-general for human rights is tasked with managing the issue throughout the UN system and submitting the secretary-general’s annual report on reprisals to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Each committee under the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), including the Human Rights Committee and the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, has a rapporteur designated to focus on reprisals, and there are numerous public and private channels intended to facilitate reporting of, responses to, and prevention of retribution against people and groups that engage with the United Nations.69 In addition, organizations like the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO) have documented numerous cases of intimidation at international forums that constitute examples of or attempts at transnational repression. Some reprisals occur extraterritorially. Representatives of minority groups from China are often surveilled and intimidated, even on UN property. The UNPO has documented Chinese officials’ practice of photographing, following, and threatening retaliation against Uyghur, ethnic Mongolian, and Tibetan activists—as well as rights defenders who are ethnic Chinese—at or ahead of UN events.70 Dokun Isa, the current president of the Uyghur World Congress, has for years encountered a series of obstacles to participation at the United Nations. In 2005, his plan to attend a session of the UNHRC in Geneva was derailed when the UN Secretariat refused to give him accreditation, saying it needed to run a background check on him. When he instead decided to participate in a protest against Chinese human rights abuses outside, he was arrested in transit to the demonstration by Swiss police. The police later said he was arrested based on a “misunderstanding,” which did not alleviate concerns that the Chinese government’s labeling of Isa as a terrorist resulted in his detention. In 2009, his plans to hold a press conference in Geneva was disrupted by the Chinese diplomatic mission, which discouraged journalists from attending an event held by a “terrorist.”71 In 2017, UN security personnel removed Isa from the UN Indigenous Forum, and in 2018 he was prevented from entering the building to participate in the forum due to unspecified “security concerns.”72 Ethiopian government delegates to the United Nations accused a civil society delegate of the Ogaden People’s Rights Organization of being a terrorist and asked security personnel to remove him from the 2016 Forum on Minority Issues.73 Security officers were on the verge of physically removing him when a representative from the Minority Forum Secretariat intervened and allowed him to stay. The Ethiopian government has long used accusations of terrorism as cover for repressing political opposition, both domestically and abroad. Ethiopian authorities’ transnational repression has largely targeted people from certain ethnic and separatist groups. In 2014, Ethiopian security forces conspired with Kenyan police to abduct two members of the separatist Ogaden National Liberation Front from Nairobi, where they had traveled to negotiate with the Ethiopian government.74 Without a universally recognized prohibition against governments acting to silence critics outside their territories, international organizations will remain vulnerable to authoritarian manipulation. The 2020 final report from the UNHRC’s Commission of Inquiry on Burundi condemned the government’s creation of a climate of intimidation, threats, fear, and reprisal aimed at people based in Burundi or in neighboring countries who wished to cooperate with the commission, other international human rights mechanisms, or NGOs.75 Burundian authorities have a record of intimidation, assassinations, and coercion by proxy targeting exiled dissidents in countries as near as Tanzania and as far as Belgium.76 One case discussed in the secretary-general’s 2021 report on reprisals is that of Fazal ur Rehman Afridi, a journalist and human rights defender from Pakistan.77 Afridi sought asylum in France in 2009 after facing intimidation and abuse in his home country, and he has lived there since. While in France, Afridi was allegedly intimidated and threatened at the direction of the Pakistani state. His relatives in Pakistan have been threatened as well. The UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID), along with several special rapporteurs, wrote a letter to Pakistan’s government in 2020, expressing concern that threats, harassment, and intimidation against Afridi had escalated in response to his freedomhouse.org 21