DEFENDING DEMOCRACY IN EXILE Policy Responses to Transnational Repression even sent agents to the United States to collect information on him. Reflecting on his experience, Soltan said, “How emboldened must they [the Egyptian authorities] feel to do things on US soil? How empowered must they feel? What sense of impunity must they have?” The effects of transnational repression on rights and freedoms Being targeted by authoritarian governments employing tactics of transnational repression transforms people’s lives in both small and profound ways. It has professional, personal, and psychological consequences. It also has wider social impacts that threaten democratic processes within the United States. Transnational repression transforms people’s lives in both small and profound ways. Most directly, being subjected to tactics of transnational repression—specifically harassment, surveillance, and intimidation—changes the way people communicate with friends, family members, and professional associates in their home countries. Some simply stop communicating all together. Sherry, a Falun Gong practitioner whose Chinabased family and business have been threatened by Chinese authorities, said, “I don’t call my parents anymore. I think it’s for the best, until things calm down a little bit…If you have to cut ties, that’s fine. If I keep calling, it’s not going to be good for them.” After Chinese authorities issued an arrest warrant for Samuel Chu accusing him of inciting secession by advocating for democracy in Hong Kong from abroad,9 communication with his family overseas became dangerous. “I haven’t talked to really anybody directly in my family since the arrest warrant,” he said. Chu also expressed concern about people around him uninvolved in activism but who may experience repression as a second-order effect because of Beijing’s ever-expanding dragnet targeting dissidents like him: “There’s a wide web of people I feel responsible for…and so I think that that is probably what weighs on me the most.” As Chu said, “This endangers other individuals because there’s really not much that they [China] can do to me.” 4 @FreedomHouse Some people continue to communicate, but only in coded ways. An asylum seeker currently living in the United States who has campaigned for the release of family members imprisoned in Saudi Arabia described speaking to her mother using code: “I talk to my mom every day,” she said, “but if we talk about my advocacy in the US, we talk about me speaking about environmentalism in Maine.” 10 Others maintain lines of communication but avoid potentially dangerous topics to try to keep their interlocutors safe. One academic from Indianadministered Kashmir said, of contacts in Kashmir: “Whenever I call my family members there, it���s just ‘Hi, hello, how are you? How is everyone there?’ We don’t talk about anything. I don’t ask my friends or colleagues about things that are happening there because so many journalists and human rights defenders have gotten detained.” 11 Being targeted by a foreign government also places real limitations on people’s ability to travel internationally for work, pleasure, or to see family. In Out of Sight, Not Out of Reach, Freedom House described the way that autocratic states leverage their control over government-issued documents to coerce and control citizens.12 But even for those who have obtained US citizenship or permanent residency and therefore no longer rely on their origin-country passports, travel can be dangerous. In August of 2020, Paul Rusesabagina, a US permanent resident and well-known Rwandan activist, was apprehended while he was travelling from the Middle East when the private plane that he thought was flying to Burundi landed in Rwanda instead.13 Rusesabagina was later convicted of terrorism and sentenced to 25 years in prison in a seriously flawed and highly politicized trial where he was refused access to evidence and to his own lawyer, and during which President Kagame publicly denounced him as a criminal.14 In addition to making international travel unsafe, transnational repression cuts off targeted individuals from entire regions of the world. Members of diasporas that Freedom House spoke to expressed deep reservations about traveling and being identified in many countries they felt were unsafe. A Saudi activist feared traveling: “I know that anywhere in the Middle East is off limits for me. I can’t go anywhere…even places like North Africa. I would love to go [there], but I’m scared.” 15 She had been badly shaken by the experience of being surveilled and followed in a European city after traveling there to attend a human rights conference in 2019. Others noted that they would not travel to countries that neighbored origin states or had friendly diplomatic relations with those states. More than an inconvenience, this limitation deprived people of mobility and the opportunity to see their families and friends. #TransnationalRepression