In August 2016, Iranian activist Mehdi Khosravi, who was living as a political refugee in the UK, stepped off a plane in Rome and straight into the iron grip of his persecutors.
Acting on a politically motivated Interpol Red Notice, Italian police arrested him at the request of Tehran, proof that an authoritarian regime can extend its claws deep into the heart of Europe.
In his case it ended well. He was released from Italian jail after a week because a network of lawyers and human rights organisations mobilised in time. Too many others are not so lucky: at least 300 human rights defenders were killed in 2023 alone for daring to speak truth to power.
These attacks are not isolated tragedies. They are chapters in a deliberate strategy of transnational repression, the practice by which authoritarian governments coerce, control or silence their critics abroad. It is the globalisation of tyranny, and Europe is its preferred hunting ground.
According to Freedom House, more than 20 percent of the world’s governments have engaged in transnational repression since 2014, mounting 1219 physical attacks in more than 100 countries. Ten serial offenders - China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Tajikistan, Egypt, Belarus, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Cambodia - account for almost 80 % of documented abuses.
Transnational repression is not merely a threat to dissidents; it is an assault on our own sovereignty, our rule of law and the very idea of safe refuge. When Beijing spies on Uyghur exiles in Paris, or Moscow’s proxies beat a Chechen blogger in Berlin, the message is unambiguous: no critic is beyond our reach, and no democracy can shield you.
The chill spreads far wider than the immediate victim. Families back home are blackmailed, diasporas fall silent, and civic space shrinks everywhere.
Yet the EU’s legal architecture still does not even define transnational repression, let alone outlaw it. Perpetrators exploit that vacuum, hijacking migration controls, banking rules and police cooperation mechanisms.
They weaponise technology - spyware, doxxing, (publishing malicious information online) deepfake humiliation, gender based online violence - while outsourcing dirty work to “private” cybersurveillance firms, organised crime intermediaries and coopted diaspora groups. Our fragmented response emboldens them.
As Rapporteur for the EU Parliament’s first ever report on transnational repression, I refuse to accept that Europe, the cradle of human rights law, cannot protect those who defend these rights. Throughout my hearings, countless human rights defenders have explained that finding safe haven and protection is much easier in Canada or Australia than here in the European Union. There’s no excuse for it, and it must change.
To do so, however, we must start to systematically raise the issue of transnational repression in EU human rights dialogues, make bilateral agreements conditional on progress in this space, and apply targeted sanctions, possibly under the EU Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime.
We also need to improve data collection, tracking and reporting mechanisms to improve the documentation of cases of cross border repression in the EU, and tackle and reduce the use of politically motivated Interpol notices by having Europol applying scrutiny. Finally, we need to tackle these attacks in their online form - evidently on an upward trend - by implementing more stringent regulations on enablers of transnational repression, among which we can find social media and spyware industries.
Some will argue that a tougher stance risks diplomatic friction. Let them remember that diplomacy without values is mere bartering. Others claim the problem is too diffuse, the perpetrators too many. That is precisely why Europe must lead: if the world’s largest democratic market, home to 450 million consumers and the euro, will not impose a cost on repression, who will?
The stakes could not be higher. A continent that cannot protect a Chechen blogger in Berlin today will struggle to protect a Belarusian journalist in another EU Member State - and, ultimately, its own citizens’ freedom of expression next.
Our message must be unequivocal: authoritarian reach ends at Europe’s borders. Each time a tyrant tests that line, the price must be swift and steep. Because when we protect the voices that authoritarians fear, we are not doing them a favour, we are defending the democratic foundations of our Union. And if Europe will not stand up for its own principles, who will stand up for Europe?
