"1. Increasing attacks on independent media globally are forcing journalists to flee their home countries. Working from abroad, these reporters remain crucial sources of information about some of the world’s most authoritarian countries. But safety in exile is not guaranteed.
2. At least 26 govern
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ments, including those of Belarus, Cambodia, China, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, have targeted journalists abroad with transnational repression, putting their safety and work in serious peril.
3. Transnational repression against journalists includes assault, detention, kidnapping, and unlawful deportation, as well as serious limitations on freedom of movement resulting from these threats. It also entails the intimidation of journalists’ family members, digital harassment, smear campaigns, doxing, and other attempts to prevent truthful reporting.
4. These attacks have a devastating impact on journalists’ well-being, as well as their ability to deliver independent reporting. Exiled reporters struggle to maintain the contacts they need to cover stories. They face death threats, online harassment, and aggressive rhetoric from officials in origin countries. Often in precarious economic situations, they must also shoulder high monetary costs to overcome censorship, protect their digital and physical security, and navigate difficult immigration bureaucracies.
5. Despite these challenges, exiled journalists have developed strategies to keep working. But they need legal, financial, and operational support from host governments, civil society, and media organizations in order to continue to expose human rights violations around the world." (Key findings)
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"Transnational repression is strategically employed by autocrats, enabled by underprepared host governments, and spreading rapidly around the world. This report aims to assess the strengths and weaknesses in the global understanding of and responses to transnational repression, so that governments,
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private companies, and civil society organizations can better equip themselves to defend human rights. Transnational repression should be recognized for what it is: a direct threat to fundamental freedoms, state sovereignty, and democracy, and a disturbing physical manifestation of global authoritarianism." (Page 2)
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"This report is the product of an effort to understand the scale and scope of “transnational repression,” in which governments reach across national borders to silence dissent among their diaspora and exile communities. Freedom House assembled cases of transnational repression from public source
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s, including UN and government documents, human rights reports, and credible news outlets, in order to generate a detailed picture of this global phenomenon.
The project compiled a catalogue of 608 direct, physical cases of transnational repression since 2014. In each incident, the origin country’s authorities physically reached an individual living abroad, whether through detention, assault, physical intimidation, unlawful deportation, rendition, or suspected assassination. The list includes 31 origin states conducting physical transnational repression in 79 host countries. This total is certainly only partial; hundreds of other physical cases that lacked sufficient documentation, especially detentions and unlawful deportations, are not included in Freedom House’s count. Nevertheless, even this conservative enumeration shows that what often appear to be isolated incidents—an assassination here, a kidnapping there—in fact represent a pernicious and pervasive threat to human freedom and security.
Moreover, physical transnational repression is only the tip of the iceberg. The consequences of each physical attack ripple out into a larger community. And beyond the physical cases compiled for this report are the much more widespread tactics of “everyday” transnational repression: digital threats, spyware, and coercion by proxy, such as the imprisonment of exiles’ families. For millions of people around the world, transnational repression has become not an exceptional tool, but a common and institutionalized practice used by dozens of regimes to control people outside their borders." (Executive summary)
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