TNR Watch: Accountability Measures for Overlooked Perpetrators

The governments of Russia, Iran, and China are among the worst perpetrators of transnational repression, and their efforts to silence critics abroad often emerge in chilling newspaper headlines. However, regimes with fewer resources, and which receive comparatively less international news coverage, are also carrying out frightening extraterritorial attacks to silence diaspora members. In fact, Freedom House has recorded incidents carried out by 44 governments, or nearly 20 percent of countries worldwide.

In February, the US Department of State sanctioned several South Sudanese nationals responsible for transnational repression. This move represented a rare effort to hold a lesser-known perpetrator government accountable.

Visa Bans: The US Department of State announced in late February that it was using the Khashoggi Ban to impose visa restrictions on several South Sudanese nationals involved in incidents of transnational repression. Under the Khashoggi Ban—which is named in honor of exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered in 2018 after entering Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul—individuals who have participated in “serious, extraterritorial counter-dissident activities” can be denied entry to the United States. The State Department said it imposed the ban after the US government received reports of South Sudanese individuals being killed, kidnapped, or forcibly returned home. Unfortunately, the US government is not permitted to publicly release the names of those sanctioned, so it remains unclear who the sanctions were applied to or for which incidents.

The South Sudanese government is responsible for six entries in Freedom House’s database of transnational repression incidents, dating back to 2014. Most recently, in February 2023, Kenya-based South Sudanese refugee Morris Mabior Awikjok Bak was removed by armed men from his Nairobi residence and taken to Juba, where he is being held incommunicado by South Sudan’s National Security Service.

Flying under the radar: The South Sudanese government is not unique in terms of its use of renditions in Africa. Comoros, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, and Sierra Leone have similarly kidnapped or secured the unlawful deportations of exiled government opponents. In other regions, lesser-known perpetrators also warrant more attention. Among these other unexpected practitioners of transnational repression include the governments of Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, and Yemen.

Accountability needed: Although the US government has applied the Khashoggi Ban against Saudi and Belarusian perpetrators of transnational repression and pursued criminal prosecution of individuals working on behalf of the Chinese and Iranian governments, accountability remains lacking for lesser-known perpetrators governments. Host-country authorities have occasionally punished individuals working for these governments, as the US has done with these South Sudanese nationals and Germany did by expelling a Vietnamese diplomat in 2017 for facilitating the abduction of a former Vietnamese government employee in Berlin. In most cases, though, a lack of awareness of the transnational repression campaigns carried out by these overlooked perpetrators or the involvement of host states themselves in the incidents have rendered justice elusive.