Transnational repression has emerged in liberal democracies where immigrant communities face various forms of harassment, intimidation, surveillance and other repressive measures, eventually making them difficult to exercise fundamental rights and freedoms for voicing concerns and foreign policy interventions in host countries.
In particular, many authoritarian regimes aggressively employ legal, extra-legal and technology-facilitated measures to surveil, intimidate and reprise their overseas mobilization. Technology-driven transnational repression becomes a new norm when AI-generated deep fakes and disinformation are instrumentalized to target activists in exile.
That said, most of the response to transnational repression remain top-down, constrained by geopolitical calculus. There is an urgent need to build trusts with at-risk communities for documenting incidents of transnational repression, building up a reliable database, investigating the hybrid attack patterns, and building capacities for communities to counter transnational surveillance and repression with new tools and strategies in solidarity with each other. Ultimately, it is of utmost importance to cultivate accountability culture for human rights violations by equipping communities with training and infrastructure to document and counter surveillance and harassment.
Against this background, RIL is developing a program to counter transnational repression by building an accountability and monitoring network in order to empower at-risk communities. Such empowerment process not only refers to building mental resilience and awareness for security management, but also aims to constructive dialogue with stakeholders concerning transnational repression in a sustainable way.
