Transnational Repression: A Year in Review

Borders no longer stop repression.

At home, autocrats, having consolidated their power, enjoy near-total impunity, crushing dissent through brutality, prisons, torture, and censorship. But when critics escape their grasp, fleeing abroad to keep their voices alive, these regimes increasingly find ways to suppress them. Using progressively sophisticated methods and relying on democratic countries’ denial and short-term economic interests, these regimes send a chilling message to dissidents: keep quiet, or we will get to you next.

Dissidents who seek refuge, hoping for safety and freedom, soon learn that no matter where they go, they are not safe.

In 2025, transnational repression proliferated. Autocratic regimes have developed their own playbook – a set of tools they use with ever more surgical precision. Increased use of technology, ubiquitous surveillance, abuse of international mechanisms, and lack of proactive response from the democratic community only embolden authoritarians, with many such acts committed on democratic countries’ soil.

This blog series examines trends in transnational repression from 2025: increasingly sophisticated abduction and assassination plots, growing weaponization of international mechanisms and institutions to target dissidents, and the impacts on both individual activists and communities targeted by such repression, including isolation of activists and erosion of trust among diaspora groups. Each blog highlights what democracies can do to ensure dissidents in exile on their soil can exercise their rights free from the threat of authoritarian repression.