DEFENDING DEMOCRACY IN EXILE Policy Responses to Transnational Repression should adhere to the International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance, a framework agreed upon by a broad consortium of civil society groups, industry leaders, and scholars with the aim of protecting users’ rights. The principles, which state that all communications surveillance must be legal, necessary, and proportionate, should also be applied to open-source intelligence methods such as social media monitoring and the use of intrusive tools such as spyware. To protect the digital security of people targeted by transnational repression, governments should refrain from introducing legislation that weakens encryption, for example by mandating “backdoor” access for authorities or the ability to trace messages. • Review the processes for issuing warnings and assigning police protection to individuals, and ensure that they account for the threat of transnational repression. • Commit to respecting the right to seek asylum. Migration systems should follow the principles set out in the 1951 Refugee Convention. Countries should not create policies with the aim of preventing asylum seekers from accessing their territory. Nor should governments shift the responsibility for asylee processing to third states where people are more vulnerable to transnational repression. • Strengthen existing refugee resettlement programs by including resources to address the threat of transnational repression faced by some newcomers. • Impose targeted sanctions on perpetrators and enablers of transnational repression. Legislation like the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act in the United States provides a mechanism for imposing travel bans and asset freezes on perpetrators of serious human rights abuses. Issuing sanctions for acts of transnational repression in particular would send a strong signal that perpetrators will be held accountable. Countries that possess Magnitsky-style laws should fully enforce them, and countries that lack such legal authorities should enact them. Whenever possible, governments should apply sanctions in a coordinated, multilateral manner for maximum impact. Limit the use of temporary and subsidiary forms of protection for asylum seekers and instead grant full refugee status. Such status offers a better safeguard against transnational repression by making the protection permanent, reducing reliance on the origin country for documents, and allowing for family reunification, which reduces the threat of coercion by proxy. • Recognize that certain populations experience persecution as a group. Official recognition would eliminate the obligation to prove individualized persecution in asylum cases. • Use persona non grata designations to ensure accountability for transnational repression. Expel diplomats who are directly involved in transnational repression, or whose governments have committed specific incidents of transnational repression in the host country. Publicly and specifically link the persona non grata designations to individual instances of transnational repression. Include details on the use of transnational repression in the information about countries of origin that is consulted during reviews of asylum applications. Such information would raise awareness among migration officials and help to thwart improper extradition or repatriation requests made by repressive governments. • Build resilience against the use of spurious terrorism charges to distort host countries’ asylum and extradition processes. Fifty-three percent of cases of physical transnational repression involve accusations of terrorism, which allow origin states to exploit the security concerns of host states and persuade them to unjustly detain and deport targeted individuals. These accusations often tap into existing xenophobic and Islamophobic biases in host countries. Governments should review migration practices to identify areas where policies focused on combating violent extremism and terrorism effectively view people as potential security threats rather than potential victims and thus overlook the risk of complicity in transnational repression. Deliver accountability for acts of transnational repression. • • • 34 Support victims of transnational repression. Restrict security assistance and arms sales to governments that perpetrate acts of transnational repression. Such governments cannot be trusted to use such assistance responsibly, and they should not be rewarded for violating individual rights and national sovereignty beyond their borders. @FreedomHouse #TransnationalRepression