Freedom House • Fund civil society organizations that monitor incidents of transnational repression or that provide resources to targeted individuals and groups. Ensure that civil society work on both digital and physical forms of transnational repression receives adequate and sustainable financing. For civil society • Invest in digital hygiene trainings and make resources on digital security widely accessible to targeted communities, reaching beyond professional activists and journalists. Where the community includes refugees, digital hygiene should be integrated into refugee resettlement programs. Digital hygiene training should include incident response planning, which allows people to prepare for the steps they should take if they suspect that their digital security has been compromised. • Continue to document incidents of transnational repression, analyze perpetrator states’ tactics, and identify gaps in policy responses. Civil society groups often have unique, on-the-ground sources of information and are a key point of contact for affected individuals. By sharing their data and analysis with the media and policymakers, they can improve public awareness and prompt more effective government action. • Develop programming for individuals affected by transnational repression, including social, psychological, legal, and immigration support. Such support should be tailored to the needs of specific diaspora communities, and it should include both harm remediation and tools for pursuing accountability. • For technology companies • Create a company-wide strategy to respond to transnational repression. Raise internal awareness and provide training on the tactics of transnational repression to avoid unwitting complicity. Relevant policy areas may include but are not limited to content moderation, harassment, foreign influence operations, cybersecurity, and privacy. Companies should develop expertise in the languages of targeted communities, work with civil society to identify individuals who may be at risk of online threats or harassment, engage with such individuals or groups to understand their needs, and share best practices with peer companies. • Adopt secure protocols like end-to-end encryption for company products and expand special protections and safety settings for people who are vulnerable to transnational repression. Companies should proactively notify users who are at risk of or have already suffered from digital attacks and offer resources on how to protect accounts. They should also cooperate with civil society to engage in outreach and draw more people into their digital hygiene programs. • Strengthen options for documenting transnational repression on digital platforms. It should be recognized that documentation is often burdensome and traumatizing for individuals, but also crucial to civil society research and law enforcement activity. Consider giving people access to tools that allow them to filter, review, report, and document transnational repression in a convenient way. Develop internal means of documenting incidents that can be used to inform company policies. Any form of documentation should prioritize user privacy. • Publicly identify perpetrators of digital transnational repression and describe the methods and scale of their activity, insofar as such revelations do not expose victims to further harm. Consider standardizing this reporting, for instance by including it in regular reports on transparency, human rights, or foreign influence operations. For UN member states • Recognize transnational repression as a specific threat to human rights and work with like-minded governments to establish norms and develop multilateral responses. • Review and revise the protections that are offered to human rights defenders and other activists who engage with the UN to better address the risk of transnational repression. The current safeguards have failed to prevent some governments from excluding, intimidating, or punishing dissidents when they attempt to participate in UN processes. Establish a special rapporteur for transnational repression. Existing rapporteurs and working groups lack the mandate required to provide a comprehensive picture of the problem. freedomhouse.org 35