In October 2025, French police arrested four people suspected of planning a physical attack on Vladimir Osechkin — a Russian human rights journalist living in exile in France, known for documenting abuse inside Russian prisons. The suspects had been conducting surveillance on his movements. He was not a former official, not a defector with state secrets. He was a journalist doing the work he could no longer safely do at home. And someone in Moscow had decided that France was not far enough away.
This is what makes transnational repression different from most human rights problems: it does not end at the border. Exile is supposed to be a solution. For a growing number of people, it is not.
The term entered mainstream policy discourse around 2021, when Freedom House released the first global dataset tracking physical incidents of states targeting their own nationals abroad. The practice it names, however, is as old as exile itself: authoritarian governments reaching across borders to silence, intimidate, or harm individuals who have left their territory. What the data has done is make the scale impossible to ignore. Freedom House’s most recent dataset records 1,375 documented physical incidents — assassinations, abductions, unlawful deportations, credible threats — carried out by 54 governments across more than 100 host countries between 2014 and 2025. Those are only the verifiable cases. The forms of repression hardest to count are almost certainly far more widespread.
What makes the phenomenon particularly difficult to address is how dispersed its instruments are. A Russian political analyst in Berlin finds her bank account frozen after Russia’s financial intelligence agency added their name to a list of “extremists” — a designation that flows automatically into compliance databases used by financial institutions across Europe. A Tajik dissident is detained at a border crossing on an Interpol Red Notice filed on charges human rights organisations have documented as fabricated. A Hong Kong pro-democracy activist discovers there is an international arrest warrant with a financial bounty attached, making free movement anywhere effectively impossible. These are not isolated failures. They are instruments, deployed to ensure that dissent abroad becomes as costly as dissent at home.
Europe’s invisible involvement
What is underappreciated — and what any serious policy response must eventually reckon with — is that European institutions are frequently part of this picture. Not through intent. Through design.
Anti-money laundering frameworks, built to prevent illicit finance, require banks to flag and freeze accounts associated with individuals on certain watchlists. When Russia’s Rosfinmonitoring agency adds a dissident to its list of “terrorists and extremists”, that designation flows automatically into compliance databases used by financial institutions across Europe. The journalist’s account is frozen. The bank is following the rules. What looks like financial compliance from one angle looks, from another, like a European bank doing Moscow’s dirty work.
Asylum systems present the same structural problem. EU member states have, in documented cases, returned individuals to their countries of origin because of terrorism designations provided by those same origin states — designations that, in countries like Tajikistan, are routinely applied to political opposition. Interpol follows an identical logic: independent monitors find that more than half of all notices reviewed by the organisation’s own compliance body are non-compliant, after they have already been disseminated to border agencies worldwide. A person can be detained at any crossing based on a notice later ruled politically motivated. The detention resolves in days or weeks. The chilling effect lasts far longer.
The EU is not merely a place where transnational repression occurs; it is, in ways its architects did not intend, a place where it is sometimes enabled.
The battle over who is responsible
There is, for the first time, a serious attempt at a European-level response. The European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs is finalising an own-initiative report on countering transnational repression — the first of its kind at EU level. The report proposes a common EU definition, an EU coordinator with a cross-institutional mandate, a data collection mechanism, safeguards against the weaponisation of financial compliance frameworks, and explicit use of the EU’s Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime against perpetrators.
The amendment process has itself been instructive. A significant bloc of MEPs — spanning the European Conservatives and Reformists, parts of the far right, and several non-attached members — has systematically attempted to reduce the report’s institutional scope: deleting references to EU-level instruments, inserting sovereignty clauses that would reduce coordination mechanisms to advisory functions, opposing anything that implies binding obligations on member states. The argument, consistently, is that national security is a national competence.
That argument has constitutional grounding. It also misreads the problem. Transnational repression is cross-border by design — perpetrator states exploit differences between national legal systems precisely because fragmented responses are easier to circumvent. As negotiations around the report have made clear, the real obstacle is not legal but political: whether member states are prepared to accept coordination in a domain they have long treated as exclusively their own.
Beyond sanctions and statements
Even in its most ambitious form, the current framework leaves meaningful gaps. The EU adopted an Anti-SLAPP Directive in 2024 specifically to combat abusive litigation against people engaged in public participation. It has not been connected to the transnational repression framework — a significant omission, given that state-sponsored lawfare is among the most consistently documented tools used against journalists and human rights defenders in exile. EU export control frameworks could similarly be updated to restrict the transfer of facial recognition systems, spyware platforms, and predictive policing infrastructure to countries with documented records of targeting their own diaspora communities abroad. The research base exists. The regulatory instruments exist. What is absent, in both cases, is the decision to apply them.
And without a formal parliamentary follow-up mechanism — regular hearings, mandatory Commission reporting, accountability for implementation — there is a real risk that even the most ambitious resolution becomes what too many before it have become: a record of good intentions.
The promise of exile
Freedom House estimates that roughly 3.5 million people worldwide are currently at risk of transnational repression. A significant number of them live in Europe — in Brussels, Berlin, Paris, Stockholm — in cities where the working assumption is that the state they fled cannot reach them. For many of them, that assumption is already wrong. They know it. They adjust their behaviour accordingly: what they post, who they call, whether they speak to their families and how often. The self-censorship is silent and largely invisible, which is precisely why it works.
The debate in Brussels is about instruments, mandates, and institutional architecture. But what it is ultimately deciding is whether the people who came here because they believed in the protection this continent is supposed to offer were right to believe it.
ASSEDEL’s role
Given this context and all its consequences, ASSEDEL has presented its analysis of the legislative process and its own amendments to rapporteur Hannah Neumann, who is responsible for the Report on Countering Transnational Repression (2025/2179(INI)): No Safe Distance from Authoritarian States in Europe.
Read here our full amendment proposal.