They opened the door. The dictators were waiting.
From the Washington Post editorial board as part of WaPo's Annals of Autocracy series:
...Around the world, dictators are dispatching assassins, kidnappers, secret police and private investigators to abduct, harass, intimidate and harm dissidents, journalists, academics and others far beyond their borders. Transnational repression, as it is called, is spreading faster than democracies can cope with it. As Freedom House noted in a landmark study 2½ years ago, dictatorships struck back at activists and journalists who were using the internet ... through spyware and online harassment, and have taken their campaigns a major step further, with surveillance, threats, disruption, kidnapping, and violence. Freedom House ... database ... had 608 cases when unveiled in February 2021 and now contains 854 incidents by 38 perpetrators in 91 countries. The top 10 perpetrators in the database are China (253), Turkey (132), Tajikistan (64), Russia (46), Egypt (45), Turkmenistan (36), Uzbekistan (36), Belarus (30), Iran (23) and Rwanda (18.) ... But the Government Accountability Office concluded in an October report that U.S. law “does not specifically criminalize or define” transnational repression and that a “lack of common understanding” about the threat, especially among state and local law enforcement, has hampered the response...
China is the world’s biggest perpetrator of transnational repression ...These new trends are evident in a series of 16 criminal complaints involving Chinese transnational repression that the Justice Department has filed since March 2022. For example, in March 2022, the Justice Department charged two men, Fan “Frank” Liu and Qiang “Jason” Sun, and a former Florida corrections officer and bodyguard, Matthew Ziburis, with plotting to harass and ruin a Chinese dissident artist in California. What made the plot unusual: Mr. Sun, a tech company official, allegedly ran the operation from Hong Kong, acting on behalf of the Chinese government, while Mr. Liu pursued dissidents from within the United States and hired the bodyguard to go after the artist...
Federal prosecutors also revealed the existence in New York of what they called an “illegal police station,” an outpost for transnational repression operated by the Chinese government in Lower Manhattan. The station had the ostensible function of allowing overseas Chinese to renew their driver’s licenses, but it also had a back-office mission to track down dissidents. The Justice Department has charged two New York men with conspiring to act as unregistered agents of the Chinese government in setting up the station...China has established such stations all over the world. They are supposedly citizen “service centers” but have a more sinister purpose, set up with the United Front Work Department, the Communist Party’s agency that seeks to co-opt ethnic Chinese individuals and communities living outside China. The human rights group Safeguard Defenders has published three reports revealing how the network was created. At first, China was seeking to nab criminals and fugitives abroad. Then China’s security services launched international long-arm policing operations known as “Fox Hunt” and “Sky Net,” supposedly aimed at fugitives involved in corruption, who were coerced to return. Sometimes the targets were harassed and kidnapped by agents abroad...
In going after critics, authoritarian regimes often help one another... For example, Turkey, ruled by autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, increasingly has acted as an agent of other repressive states, such as China, in seeking to capture ethnic Uyghurs who fled in fear of being incarcerated in concentration camps ... A State Department and Justice Department joint report to Congress in August 2022 found that progress has been made, but ... Repressive regimes disguise their requests as based on ordinary crimes so that Interpol won’t detect they are politically motivated. Dictators also misuse the labels “terrorist” or “extremist” to define their foes. Russia and China do this frequently. Freedom House found in 2021 that in 58 percent of the cases in its database, states used the “terrorist” label to go after their enemies...
FARA should be revised to give law enforcement a stronger tool to identify and stop those who are secretly doing the bidding of overseas autocrats... Several bills have been introduced in Congress that would take steps to codify transnational repression as a crime, such as the Transnational Repression Policy Act, which calls for updating U.S. laws to criminalize “the gathering of information about private individuals in diaspora and exile communities on behalf of a foreign power that is intending to harass, intimidate, or harm an individual ..." The GAO has also suggested pressuring perpetrators that benefit from U.S. arms exports by using a provision of the Arms Export Control Act of 1976 barring arms sales to countries engaged in a pattern of intimidation or harassment directed at individuals in the United States. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are among the top 25 arms-transfer recipients....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/09/dictators-transnational-repression/
