“We Will Find You” A Global Look at How Governments Repress Nationals Abroad
Human Rights Watch, “We Will Find You”: A Global Look at Transnational Repression (2024) examines how governments increasingly target critics, dissidents, journalists, human rights defenders, and diaspora communities beyond their borders through a range of abusive practices known as transnational repression. Drawing on more than 75 cases from the past 15 years involving over two dozen governments, the report documents tactics including assassinations, abductions, unlawful extraditions, harassment of family members, digital surveillance, and the misuse of Interpol. The report highlights Iran as a significant perpetrator of transnational repression, documenting its use of threats, intimidation, surveillance, harassment of family members inside Iran, and attempts to silence journalists, activists, and political opponents abroad. It concludes that these practices have a profound chilling effect on freedom of expression, association, and assembly within diaspora communities and calls on governments to strengthen protections for those at risk, prevent abuses of international mechanisms, and hold perpetrators accountable.
Summary on Iran
In October 2019, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps Intelligence arrested Rouhallah Zam, an Iranian journalist and dissident living in exile in France who founded a popular Telegram channel. He was likely abducted while visiting Iraq. He was forcibly returned to Iran. In December 2020, Iranian authorities executed Zam following a trial that Human Rights Watch characterized as “grossly unfair.”
In 2021, a New York federal court unsealed an indictment against four men who allegedly “conspired to kidnap” American-Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad, who was living in New York. Alinejad founded the campaign called “My Stealthy Freedom,” which advocates against compulsory hijab wearing in Iran. Since leaving Iran, she has been the target of harassment and intimidation by Iranian authorities due to her activities, and her family in Iran have also been threatened.
Read the full report in PDF format.