Authoritarian regimes have more tools than ever at their disposal to target dissidents and activists abroad. This “golden age” of transnational repression is marked by surveillance and physical violence. But regimes also use tactics with a veneer of legitimacy, including leveraging the international legal system to carry out acts of transnational repression. Extradition treaties, deportation requests, abuse of INTERPOL Red Notices, and regional information-sharing bodies allow these regimes to trap dissidents in legal proceedings and drag them back to their home countries.
Extradition Treaties
The first instruments autocrats turn to when they cannot rely on hired guns or covert agents to silence dissidents abroad are extradition treaties.These bilateral or multilateral agreements are meant to promote justice by ensuring that those accused or convicted of common crimes cannot evade accountability simply by crossing borders. Through extradition, one country formally surrenders a person to another so the individual can face prosecution or serve a sentence. In principle, extradition is a legal and tightly regulated process.
Yet in practice, authoritarian regimes turn extradition treaties into instruments of repression to pursue dissidents abroad. This danger is hardly new. Even in the earliest extradition treaties, negotiators recognized the risk of political misuse and sought to prevent it by excluding political offenses from the list of extraditable crimes. What has changed, however, is the sophistication with which autocrats now navigate and exploit these agreements.
Authoritarian regimes now disguise their transnational repression by prosecuting dissidents under vague public security laws. Such charges discredit opponents, recast persecution as legitimate security policy, and make it harder for the countries where extradition is sought to scrutinize the case. As a result, dissidents often find themselves dragged into lengthy extradition proceedings, facing uncertain outcomes.
Uyghur activist and human rights advocate Idris Hasan was held for more than three and a half years in detention in Morocco following an extradition request from China on accusations of terrorism. Hasan was finally released from custody in February 2025. Although Morocco had initially approved his extradition to China, sustained pressure from human rights organizations and UN bodies ensured the decision was never carried out. Throughout his detention, Idris lived in constant fear of deportation to China.
Lilya Manyukhina, a 29-year-old Russian anti-war activist and former prisoner of conscience, fled Russia after serving part of a two-and-a-half-year sentence for her protest and sought refuge in Armenia in 2024 – only to find herself trapped in extradition proceedings in August 2025. Armenian authorities initially detained her for 40 days when Russia requested her extradition, but as of this writing, she remains in custody as the court deliberates on whether to hand her over to Moscow. Even if Manyukhina stays in Armenia and Yerevan refuses to hand her over to Moscow, she will potentially spend months or years in judicial limbo, with her liberties limited. Putting dissidents in such a situation is part of the strategy – it reminds them that they are always one step away from having their freedoms being deprived.
Authoritarian regimes now openly conflate political repression with extradition in their own official statements. In April 2025, the Russian Interior Ministry vowed to take “all legally prescribed measures” to detain and extradite exiled associates of the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny, whom it accused of “terrorism- and extremism-related offenses.”
Even as democracies refuse many extradition requests that bear the marks of political abuse, some cases still fall through the cracks of lengthy, exhausting, and sometimes biased proceedings. And some nations, including democratic ones, betray their ideals when it suits their strategic or economic interests, trading long-term human rights principles for short-term gains.
In the meantime, autocrats continue to expand the international extradition system, signing new agreements – including with democracies – that allow these abuses to persist.
Some authoritarians have gone even further, supplementing treaties with other legal mechanisms to serve as instruments of repression under the guise of international cooperation.
INTERPOL Mechanisms
Authoritarian regimes use the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) to extend the reach of their repression abroad. Established to facilitate collaborative policing across borders, the organization’s toolkit, particularly its Red Notices, enable governments to request the cooperation of law enforcement worldwide to locate and detain wanted fugitives. In principle, these notices are a powerful instrument supplementing extradition treaties by coordinating law enforcement to ensure accountability beyond borders. But in the hands of authoritarians, its mechanisms can be similarly weaponized to criminalize dissent from anywhere in the world.
A Red Notice, once circulated, can prompt automatic arrests at border crossings, travel restrictions, asset freezes, and reputational harm. While INTERPOL prohibits the issuance of Red Notices for political activity, regimes like Russia, China, Turkey, Nicaragua and Egypt have repeatedly exploited INTERPOL’s automated processing and limited vetting to pursue journalists, opposition figures, and human rights advocates under fabricated criminal charges. By framing political opposition under broad charges such as “terrorism,” “fraud,” or “extremism,” authoritarian regimes cloak repression in the language of legitimate law enforcement.
Red Notices can trap targeted individuals in prolonged legal battles to prove their innocence. In October 2024, Belarusian opposition activist Andrei Hniot was released from detention in Serbia after a year-long legal battle. Only after sustained pressure from lawyers and human rights organizations did INTERPOL finally recognize the political nature of Hniot’s case and remove him from its Red Notice list. In August 2025, INTERPOL likewise deleted a Red Notice Belarus wrongly issued after lawyers showed it was being used to punish a man for taking part in peaceful prodemocracy demonstrations. In another 2025 case, Poland refused to extradite a Belarus citizen because authorities concluded that the regime of Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko routinely misuses INTERPOL mechanisms and criminal charges to target political opponents.
Although INTERPOL has sought to strengthen its oversight through bodies like the Commission for the Control of Files (CCF), its reforms remain reactive and ultimately ineffective in addressing autocrats’ persistent misuse of the mechanism. As long as member states are given the power to disguise political persecution as legitimate law enforcement, authoritarian manipulation of global policing mechanisms will persist in punishing dissent abroad.
Regional Cooperation Initiatives
Regional cooperation initiatives deepen economic and security linkages, enabling transnational repression even further. The horizon of future cooperation makes members much more likely to support each other’s repressive actions, particularly when members have weak rule of law and accountability mechanisms. Most exiled dissidents have limited mobility and typically settle in neighboring or culturally proximate states, which means that in practice, these regional initiatives can trap regime critics in a tight authoritarian web.
Shared counter-terrorism and security initiatives are a common mechanism for authoritarian abuse. These initiatives operationalize information-sharing and logistical coordination, while lending the targeting of dissidents a veneer of legitimacy. Such collaboration, in turn, increases the likelihood that perpetrating regimes will conceal instances of repression, including an arbitrary extradition and rendition, because using informal or bilateral channels enables states to circumvent internationally scrutinized mechanisms (such as Interpol’s Red Notice system) and maintain plausible deniability.
For instance, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the Arab Interior Ministers’ Council (AIMC) use shared security databases and broadly defined “cybercrime” conventions to facilitate reciprocal surveillance and harassment of exiled critics. Iraq deported Kuwaiti activist Salman al-Khalidi to Kuwait for his online criticism of the regime following an AIMC warrant the same month.
Emerging Mechanisms
As authoritarians advance new international mechanisms with the potential to facilitate further transnational repression, democratic nations risk ceding their role in shaping the rules of international cooperation. In October 2025, 72 states signed the UN Convention against Cybercrime. Promoted by Russia and China, the convention introduces vaguely-defined terms such as “disinformation,” “extremism,” and “incitement” that reflect the domestic repressive laws already used in both domestic and transnational repression of authoritarian regimes around the world. The treaty encourages international cooperation to prosecute individuals accused of cybercrime and includes provisions on cross-border data sharing, providing new justifications as well as new methods for authoritarian governments to pursue dissidents beyond their borders.
Ending Democracies’ Complicity
Dissidents in exile have fled their homes in order to freely exercise their rights. But authoritarian regimes are increasingly collaborating through extradition treaties, Red Notices, and regional cooperation mechanisms to target dissent abroad – sometimes even in democratic states. These strategies do more than threaten individual activists: they undermine the very systems meant to exact justice and prevent transnational crime.
Some democracies are improving protection for the dissidents they host in their countries. For example, Canada’s government recently confirmed that countering foreign influence is an “utmost priority” and is in the process of appointing a foreign interference commissioner to address transnational repression. However, others have fallen short, delivering dissidents into the hands of the very regimes they sought to escape.
Countries hosting dissidents in exile and diaspora communities must take stronger measures to protect against transnational repression. Democracies should prioritize human rights when considering extradition requests, and should apply greater scrutiny to INTERPOL notices to ensure they avoid complicity in autocrats’ exploitation of regional and global mechanisms. Democracies must also refuse to normalize or legitimize these practices and call out countries that abuse these tools.
