DEFENDING DEMOCRACY IN EXILE Policy Responses to Transnational Repression It is a common practice for authorities to provisionally detain a person named in a Red Notice, with little attention paid to that state’s human rights record. Convention is often used as a “folding screen” to ease extradition and prevent examination of the validity of law enforcement requests coming from states known to employ transnational repression.11 Formal legal cooperation is one of the most common tactics of transnational repression and one of the main ways in which origin states co-opt host states so as to reach dissidents across borders. Interpol’s Red Notices, another notorious tool of transnational repression, are also not scrutinized by Ukrainian authorities.12 It is a common practice for authorities to provisionally detain or otherwise restrict the mobility of a person named in a Red Notice while they notify the requesting state, with little attention paid to that state’s human rights record. This practice can have serious consequences for the detained 4 @FreedomHouse individuals. In late 2017, Fikret Huseynli, an Azerbaijani journalist and Dutch national who has been critical of the Azerbaijani regime, was prevented from leaving Kyiv based on a Red Notice issued by Baku. He reported being followed and intimidated by Azerbaijani-speaking men after his release from a Kyiv detention center, and he was violently attacked in his temporary residence some months later, while still in legal limbo.13 In addition to formal channels of bilateral cooperation, advocates working with political exiles note that the SBU engages in information cooperation with the security services of other post-Soviet states, driven in part by long-standing cultural and social ties. An interviewee who works as a human rights lawyer in Ukraine observed that “the cooperation of our SBU with the authoritarian regimes of the post-Soviet states is routine…. Whole generations of employees in these countries are friends and colleagues.” 14 This sentiment has been echoed by others in the field, with one prominent legal activist arguing that “formal and informal cooperation” between security services is a more serious problem than mechanisms like Red Notices, which can be addressed openly through the courts.15 The most common product of such cooperation is the informal and illegal exchange of information about the location of targeted individuals, which can facilitate physical attacks or rendition. #TransnationalRepression