Authoritarian governments that reach across borders to persecute their own citizens did so at a greater rate last year, particularly in Southeast Asia and east Africa, a human rights group said yesterday.
The phenomenon of so-called transnational repression exploded into public awareness with the horrific murder of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi at his country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2018.
In an annual report on transnational repression, rights group Freedom House said that China was the world’s “leading perpetrator” last year, followed by Vietnam and Russia.
Photo: Reuters
Six countries joined a long list of violators for the first time: Afghanistan, Benin, Georgia, Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
The new additions raised to at least 54 the number of countries known to carry out this kind of rights violation since 2014, Yana Gorokhovskaia, a coauthor of the report, said in an interview.
That is more than one-quarter of the world’s countries.
“Collaboration among authoritarian governments fueled transnational repression in Southeast Asia and east Africa in 2025,” the report says. “Over half of the incidents recorded last year — 69 of 126 — occurred in these two regions.”
“The trend that’s emerging is that a lot of those governments, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, are cooperating to sort of trade dissidents back and forth to help arrest them,” Gorokhovskaia said.
That kind of government behavior tends to happen when such regimes are under election-related stress, she said.
In November 2024, Ugandan opposition leader Kizza Besigye was abducted in Kenya and taken to Uganda, where he now faces charges of treason.
In January last year, Tanzanian rights advocate Maria Sarungi Tsehai was kidnapped on the streets of Nairobi, but released following a swift intervention by rights groups that triggered a media uproar.
In Southeast Asia, Thailand yielded to pressure from China and Vietnam to turn over representatives of ethnic minority groups, fearing reprisal and economic punishment from Beijing, the study said.
Because of immigration restrictions around the world, “dissidents tend to actually not be able to get very far from their own region,” Gorokhovskaia said, citing as examples Cambodians who seek refuge in Thailand and Russians who go to Turkey. “And so what that means is that there’s a lot more transnational repression in these authoritarian neighborhoods, because that’s where the dissidents can make it to.”
“With 49 incidents, detention was the most ubiquitous tactic of transnational repression documented last year. It was followed closely, with 48 incidents, by unlawful deportation,” the report said.
Among its recommendations the rights group said countries with democracies should slap sanctions on foreign leaders who favor transnational repression through forced returns of dissidents to their home countries.
These rule-of-law countries should impose sanctions and visa bans against foreign government officials who facilitate transnational repression via forced returns, Freedom House said.
Democratic governments should also seek accountability from government officials in host countries who facilitate and enable such rights abuses, it said.
“Transnational repression is a low-cost way of maintaining a regime by cracking down on dissent,” Gorokhovskaia said.
She said that although countries that engage in this kind of repression might be hit with sanctions, that punishment tends to be short-lived — as in the case of the outcry against Saudi Arabia after the murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi, a US resident who had been critical of Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
“There was an instant reaction, but that pressure wasn’t maintained and eventually the relationship sort of normalized,” Gorokhovskaia said.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
SUPERFAN: The Japanese PM played keyboard in a Deep Purple tribute band in middle school and then switched to drums at university, she told the British rock band Legendary British rock band Deep Purple yesterday made Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s day with a brief visit to their high-profile superfan as they returned to the nation they first toured more than half a century ago. Takaichi’s reputation as an amateur drummer, and a fan of hard rock and heavy metal has been well documented, and she has referred to Deep Purple as one of her favorite bands along with the likes of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. “You are my god,” a giddy Takaichi said in English to Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice, presenting him with a set of made-in-Japan
RSS