There is No Safe Place

Host: In 2020, back in pandemic lockdown days, Finn Lau got into the habit of taking a daily walk …

Finn Lau: …maybe around 30 minutes, maybe one hour. And then I simply walked along the river…

Host … the River Thames. Finn Lau is a Hong Konger and he was living in London. Out for a walk when…

Finn Lau: All of a sudden I realized that there are three people. And then they seemed to be following me. They were well covered in face masks, hoodies. I couldn’t see their faces.

Host: Now if you’re an East Asian  man walking alone in London and you’re being followed, it could be: a) your imagination, b) thieves, c) racist thugs, or d) agents acting on behalf of the Chinese government. Finn Lau knew that D was a real possibility, because he was an activist.

Newsreel/VOA: The 29-year old helped to organize the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

Archival/Finn Lau: I proposed different kind of strategies, hosting different rallies, and even do advocacy abroad.

Archival/Deutchewelle: His slogans, “Fight for Freedom” and “Stand with Hong Kong” have now become battle cries. [protest cries]

Newsreel/Sky News: There is no peace in Hong Kong… [sounds of fighting]

Host: Finn Lau had done most of his activism on-line, using a pseudonym, from London, where he worked a day job as a surveyor. Almost nobody knew who he really was as protests exploded in 2019.

Newsreel/Sky News: Umbrellas and bottles versus shields and batons.

Host: These were the biggest pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong’s history, and they went on for six months.  Long before he was attacked in London, Finn Lau went back to Hong Kong to join the protests.

FL: I have to show some kind of qualities such as willing to take risk during difficult times. That is how we set some kind of good examples in the fights for democracy. So that's why I went back to Hong Kong.

Host: …where he was arrested, along with thousands of other protestors.

Newreel/VOA: …but Hong Kong authorities failed to identify him as a ringleader, and he was released.

Host: Finn Lau escaped back to London, into what was now political exile. He thought he was safe, until he saw those three guys wearing face masks and hoodies following him…

FL: And then I tried to stop by a lamppost, but that was a serious mistake, because once I stopped by the lamppost, they simply rushed to me and punched my right eye. The whole for my face, the whole for my body was covered with blood coming out from, from my head. And so there was a moment that, uh, I was beaten to the floor, couldn't see anything.  And I asked myself, ‘is this the end of my life?’

Host: He passed out. For how long?  Doesn’t remember…

FL: …And I think they thought I was dead already. That’s why they stopped attacking me.

Host: Finn Lau managed to get back to his apartment, then went to the hospital. The police were of little help, they didn’t identify or apprehend the perpetrators. He hadn’t been robbed; he didn’t hear any racist slurs; and he couldn’t identify them with any details other than being East Asian. Finn Lau suspected the Chinese government had sent them, but he had no proof. Not long afterwards, the Hong Kong Government, controlled by Beijing, put out a bounty. $128,000 for his arrest. Finn Lau now knew the authorities had finally figured out who he was.

FL: The bounty has shows that or indicated they are getting bolder and more uh, uh, willing to go beyond the judicial system to get their dirty works done.

Host: This is Rights & Wrongs, a podcast from Human Rights Watch. I'm Ngofeen Mputubwele. I am a writer,  a lawyer, and a radio producer. Human Rights Watch asked me to look at human rights hotspots around the world through the eyes and ears of the people on the front lines of history.

This week, we’re talking about “transnational repression.” (I find it hard to say, “transnational repression,” but I promise by the end of this episode I’ll have it nailed down.)  Because it’s a very useful term to explain what’s been happening to Finn Lau and others like him…

Ngofeen: Um,  who are you? What do you do? 

Sarah Yager: I am Washington Director at Human Rights Watch. So I look at the entire world of human rights abuses and try to get the United States to do something about them. 

Ngofeen: Oh, do you have a name? [laughs]

SY: Oh Gosh I'm not just my title. I am Sarah Yager.

NM: I wanted to speak to Sarah Yager, the Washington DC director of Human Rights Watch because she recently co-wrote a report called “We Will Find You: A Global Look at How Governments Repress Nationals Abroad.” Now you might notice, the term ‘transnational repression,’ which is what the report is about, is not in the title. Maybe they were having trouble with the phrase as well?

So this episode's about transnational repression and the recurring theme on this show is that I'm very into etymology and words and things. Transnational repression, when I heard the word, I did not know exactly what it meant. Do you happen to know when it was coined or when it got started getting used? 

SY: There's no formal definition of transnational repression. And the actual phrase, which is extraordinarily wonky, and I wish we could come up with a different one, has started to be used just in the past, maybe two or three years by governments and by advocacy groups like us to try to define this thing that is governments, mostly repressive governments, who don't like what opposition is saying about them. So it could be human rights defenders, journalists, political opposition. And when those people are in danger, often they flee that country. When they go to a different country, they realize that they're still not safe. And so the repressive government is reaching across borders to repress people.

NM: Got it. So we've already heard one example of transnational repression. Can you give us another example that you know about? 

[begin cheering from live performance of Bi-2 song, then music]

SY: There’s this fascinating story from early this year where an anti-war Russian, Belorussian band called Bi-2 that was playing in Thailand, and they had been very outspoken about the Russian government's repression, and the Russian government wanted them back to face charges for being anti-war, speaking out against the invasion of Ukraine. And basically, Russia said, ‘Thailand, you need to send them back to us’. Thailand then issued an arrest warrant for them saying that they didn't have a permit.

Archive/AP: A Russian rock band that has openly expressed opposition to the war in Ukraine is now reportedly facing possible deportation from Thailand…

Archive/Deutsche Welle: [In German] Alles … in Israel angekompt.

SY: They actually ended up in Tel Aviv, Israel, for fears that they would be sent back to Russia…

Host: I looked into this after we spoke, and learned that some of the band members had dual Russian/Israeli citizenship, so that and a lot of diplomacy was how the band escaped Russian efforts to force them back to Russia.

NM: From what I understand, transnational repression, there's different types of it. There's different flavors, if you will, How would you describe that form?

SY: Yeah, so we call that a removal. There's removals, there's abductions, there's extraditions, they all have slightly different meanings, but we would call that a removal. So they are being removed from a third party country and sent back to their origin country.

There are abductions. You see Rwanda actually engaging in quite a lot of abductions as their form of transnational repression. So somebody that is speaking out against the Rwandan government will get on a plane to Burundi and will end up in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, and then of course, we'll be arrested, detained. There are these removals with INTERPOL, and INTERPOL is maybe an acronym that not a lot of people understand…

Host: Interpol, that’s the International Criminal Police Organization…

SY: …it’s based in Europe, it is, um, it's not a police force, but rather it is a place where governments can send in arrest warrants. So Government x says hey interpol. We are looking for this guy who did this thing And interpol will send out what's called a red notice to all of the other governments in interpol Um, which are most of the governments in the world and so it's an information law enforcement information sharing system.  A lot of those red notices have been called into question because Government X can say, hey, we're going after this guy, but they might be going after him for human rights work, for being a political opponent. For being a journalist who has reported about the country's abuses. That's another way that governments can transnationally repress.

Host: So authoritarian governments, using a variety of techniques, can and do extend their power beyond their borders to attack their opponents. But it’s not just the repressive authoritarian governments that make it happen. It takes at least two to tango…

SY: It requires another government to say yes, or to look the other way, or even to just not know about it. And that's what happened this past year in the United States and Canada, where members of the Indian government issued assassination orders. for Sikh separatists, Sikh being S I K H, who were living in the United States and Canada…

Archival/ABC News Australia: This yellow circle marks the spot where the father of two was murdered allegedly by two gunmen connected to the Indian government.

SY: There was an investigation by both Canada and the United States.

ABC: Last week the Canadian prime minister said he believed India was behind the killing. Trudeau: Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty.

SY: That is transnational repression.

NM: I want to like zoom out and be dumb for a moment because it's a genuine question that I have. Help me understand why we care about transnational repression. And I mean it from this angle. So  there are people suffering war crimes. I understand. I'm like, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I should care about that. Like a bunch of innocent people are dying. I think transnational repression is harder to process because it, it almost comes to my brain as a government doing like a one off thing to some person, which I'm, my brain processes like shitty, but why do I care?

SY: Right, it has nothing to do with us.

NM: Yeah. Exactly, like why is this a thing that we are invested in?

SY: Do you remember some of those movies? You know, back in the 70s or 80s with spies and, you know, people running for their lives, and they would go hide out, they'd, you know, lots of them hid out in Argentina or very, you know, various other places because their lives were in danger or they worried about their families and they had said something about the government.

That's not possible anymore. You cannot hide. There is no safe place because of transnational repression. Now, back then. You know, maybe the government would have assassination teams and they'd try to send them out, but that was really resource intensive. You had to be a pretty big enemy of the state, um, to be in danger like that.

Once you fled the country, you could think that you were relatively safe.  Now that's no longer the case. And that's because, um, Governments care a lot about who's saying bad things about them, who are calling out their abuses, who's making it public. Because once you make something like that public, it's everywhere, it's on social media, it's like, this is the credibility and legitimacy of governments.

So they care a whole lot if you are saying bad things about them, and they will come after you, and now it is easier for them to come after you. So, it's both, you can make things very public. that they don't like, and they can come after you in much easier ways, including through something that we haven't talked about yet, which is digital transnational repression.

So that's spyware on your phone, it's surveillance, like they see everything that you tweet, the calls that you make, the texts that you get, and then they can use those things against you, or against your family back home to threaten you. So those are some of the ways in which, um, it is easier and perhaps more prevalent than it used to be.

There's also a chilling effect, and this is where it matters to all of us. Human rights defenders around the world can be less willing to speak out against government abuses because of this transnational repression. You know, if I were in a repressive country, and I saw one of my colleagues, say, from Human Rights Watch, detained, their families threatened, sent back from another country where they had fled, I would be much less likely to speak out.

That harms all of us because then abuses become, you know, they go underground.

I am very free sitting here in Washington to speak out against whatever administration is in power. You're doing this wrong, you're doing that wrong, don't engage in this, don't engage in that.  If that government should change, And they don't want me saying those things and I flee for my life I would not be safe.

And, and I think that means that all of us start to question whether we should be speaking out about human rights abuses.

NM: That makes perfect sense. Transnational repression ends up almost being like a, the enforcement arm of the, of the state's power, where it's like, we don't want you to say a thing,  you flee, but if we still have the power to repress you transnationally, then we still sort of have a control.

SY: That's right. They have quite a lot of control. We become very scared. And that gives even more power to repressive and authoritarian governments, which is not what we want to see in this moment. You know, they're already gaining quite a lot more power. That's the way that the world is tilting. And this is certainly acting in their favor.

****

HRW AD: Hi. My name is Sam Dubberley. I’m the director of the Technology, Rights & Investigations division at Human Rights Watch. A couple of years ago, my colleague sent me and my team some horrific cell-phone videos. They purported to show the aftermath of Saudi border guards firing on migrants trying to cross into the country from Yemen - a remote, mountainous region that is impossible to reach. She wanted to know, could these videos be verified? That was a job for me and my team. We were able to collect more videos from social media sites, such as TikTok and Facebook and geolocate many of them to this region on the Saudi border. We used satellite imagery to prove that cemeteries near the border were expanding. The scale of the killing was shocking. So, yes, we were abel to support eye witness testimony of a potential crime against humanity perpetrated by the Saudi government on desperate migrants from the Horn of Africa who were simply trying to find work. We can’t do work like this without your support. Please go to our website, hrw.org and click on donate now. Thank you.

****

Host: Here is yet another example of transnational repression. One of the most infamous examples…

Khashoggi/France24: Saudis are being silenced. Things are not being transparent, and that is not a good recipe for reform in Saudi Arabia, and he needs to do something about that.

Host: This is Jamal Khashoggi… the name probably rings a bell. He was a Saudi journalist and dissident who was frequently critical of the Saudi government.

In 2017 he fled Saudi Arabia and settled in the United States, where he began writing columns for the Washington Post, among other outlets. In 2018 he was planning to marry a woman who was getting her Ph.D at a university in Istanbul. And to get married, he needed some paperwork from his native country…

Newsreel/The Wall Street Journal: This is CCTV of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi entering the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul on October 2nd. He hasn’t been seen since…

BBC: He was strangled as soon as he entered the building by a team of Saudi assassins, who then dismembered his body.

BBC: A U.S. intelligence report has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman personally approved the murder of the exiled journalist Jamal Khasoggi in 2018.

Host: The Saudi government blamed Khashoggi’s death on rogue government operatives. Secret prosecutions took place, but no high-ranking officials were ever charged, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Biden/debate/ Politico: Khashoggi was in fact murdered and dismembered, and I believe by the order of the Crown Prince…

Host: When he was a candidate in 2020, Joe Biden promised to treat the Saudi kingdom as a pariah because of the Khashoggi killing. But a few years later, when he was president…

Archival/Al Jazeera: The president’s goal is to reset relations, and convince the Kingdom to pump more oil to bring down fuel prices in the United States…

Host: Biden was photographed fist bumping with Mohammed bin Salman on a visit to Jeddah.

All of which leads to a big question for Sarah Yager …

NM: What's stopping the world, like what's the hindrance from doing a better job at kind of regulating or responding to transnational repression, transnational repression and protecting exiles from their home governments? What's the impediment or like the challenge?

SY: It's a really challenging issue, this transnational repression, because it comes in so many forms. So, you've got a government response, let's say, to assassinations.  You also need a government response to the consular services, and a government response to, um, extradition, and then Interpol, and, and they all look a little bit different.

There's also a real question about, um, and this is what I'm very worried about and I think why some governments have been reticent to go full force into addressing transnational repression  - governments can go too far. They're known for going too far. So if you look at okay, you've got the terrorism then you've got the counter terrorism suddenly encountering terrorism you're surveilling Muslim communities. You've got a travel ban, you've got torture. You've got like all the abuses that came from the response to 9/11. That could very easily happen with transnational repression. And so there's a balancing act between,  for example, knowing that,  surveilling communities that might be in danger… And I'm thinking specifically about, for example, the Sikh community here in the United States. Knowing that India wants to go after them, how much do you surveil? Where does that get into privacy rights?  How do you know that this Indian assassin is going to come after a particular leader?

Does it include phone taps? Does it include drone surveillance over a community? What are the resources to do that? You know, particularly in a state like the United States, which has so many diaspora communities and so many people flee here looking for safety. That's a really tricky thing.

NM: Hmm. I imagine it's not very successful if you go to, like, your local police office and you're like, the government of X country is threatening me. I feel like my local police office isn't necessarily gonna even know what to do about it.

SY: Interestingly they might because, yeah, governments around the world have been pretty slow to act on transnational repression. But the United States and some European governments have been ramping up their responses. They've been very worried. And you know, it, it angers them that another country is reaching across U.  S. borders to target their citizens. That's not okay by the U. S. government. Um, and so, um, They have come together, the FBI, DHS, which is the Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department, they've all come together to try to address this problem, and what's really interesting is that the Department of Homeland Security, now has community engagement officers and liaisons, so they'll go out to diaspora communities that are particularly threatened and say, if you've seen something, if you're willing to say something, they have an anonymous hotline, they're educating all of the people, everyone who answers the phone for 9 1 1, the emergency number here in the United States, has been trained on transnational repression. So, if you call 9 1 1, and you don't have to know what transnational repression means,  you don't have to say those words, but now they know to pick that up and to be able to report it into the FBI or DHS, who can then handle it from there, but you actually may be able to go to your local police department and say this is happening to me and they will have a way of addressing it.

NM: Oh wow. At this point, what do you, what do you have as recommendations as to what should happen to continue to, like, develop this body of response to transnational, uh, repression?

SY: So one bucket of recommendations, um, is to help the diaspora community. So what I like about what the United States has done, um, is, having the anonymous hotline, having community liaisons, giving communities and people who might be in danger a way to get in touch with authorities who can then help them and many are going to be very scared to do that.

So the United States and others, there are some European nations who are thinking about doing this, the EU, they have to be very careful about how they do this. They have to earn the trust of those diaspora communities. The second bucket. is about diplomacy. And this is more difficult, because let's say that Saudi Arabia is transnationally repressing dissidents. And it is.  The United States is currently thinking about, or trying to get passed, a Saudi defense pact. So getting closer to Saudi Arabia, not being as willing to condemn Saudi abuses, domestically.  And what are they going to go say about Saudi transnational repression? It's possible that the Secretary of State will sit down with Mohammed bin Salman and say, Hey, you know, get your hands out of the United States. Don't do that here. And probably he will. But if it happens, the US now has so much else that's at stake, that has to do with big geopolitical issues, that it's possible that A lot of these repressive governments can continue to get away with what they're getting away with and so that's where it requires nations that have transnational repression happening inside of their borders, they've got to get a backbone and they've got to prioritize this.

Host: As I mentioned earlier, there’s a Human Rights Report on  this topic. It’s called “We Will Find You: A Global Look at How Governments Repress Nationals Abroad,” and you can find it at HRW dot org.

You’ve been listening to Rights and Wrongs, from Human Rights Watch. This episode was produced by me and Curtis Fox. Our associate producer is Sophie Soloway. Thanks also to Ifé Fatunase, Stacy Sullivan, and Anthony Gale. The archival clips in this episode are from Sky News, Deutsche Welle, The Voice of America, ABC News Australia, and Al Jazeera.

I’m Ngofeen Mputubwele. Talk to you again in two weeks.