![]() "So they don't need to invest a lot of manpower or send agents to spy on dissidents abroad," he said.Ī telling example is Egyptian opposition figure Ayman Nour, a friend of Khashoggi, and exiled in Turkey.Ĭitizen Lab, a body for research into technology, human rights and security, said it found two sets of spyware on Nour's mobile phone - Pegasus and Predator - operated by two different governments.Ĭalling spying "a form or organised crime", Nour said he always thought of his phone as "a radio that anybody can listen to".Īmnesty International has identified 11 government clients for Pegasus which allows "the surveillance of anybody in a completely invisible and untraceable way", said Roux.Īctivists in China defending the rights of the Uyghur minority, against which western countries say China is committing "genocide", often find that digital threats precede physical violence, said Michaelson. They have a "commercial market for surveillance technologies" at their disposal, such as the Israeli-made spy software Pegasus, which are cost-effective, he said. "They have made me paranoid, suspicious, scared, even in exile," said Siddiqui, who has opened "The Dissident Club" in Paris, a bar dedicated to discussion, exhibitions and screenings.ĭigital technologies give repressive regimes a whole new toolkit to sidestep the political cost or diplomatic risk that can come with physical action against dissidents, with "almost no consequences", said Michaelson. The threat came the same year as the suspicious deaths of a Pakistani journalist in Sweden, and of a Pakistani human rights activist in Canada, and a year before a British court convicted a man for conspiring to murder a Pakistani blogger in Dutch exile. In 2020 a Pakistani intelligence officer told Siddiqui's parents that "if Taha thinks he's safe in Paris, he is mistaken. Pakistani journalist Taha Siddiqui, who fled to France after a kidnapping attempt he blamed on his home country's security services, said he still didn't actually feel safe in exile, only "safer". Turkish intelligence "is very active, especially in Germany and France," he said, recalling the attack by three men on a Turkish journalist in Berlin in July 2021 who warned him to stop writing about certain topics. ![]() "In the first year we found a Turkish camera crew (.) recording our office and giving all the details of our office, including our address and our daily work schedule, at what time we are there, at what time we are getting out etc, and showing it as the 'headquarters of the traitors' making plans against Turkey," he told AFP. ![]() Turkish journalist Can Dundar, who runs a website and a radio station aimed at Turkey and Turkish immigrants from exile in Germany, has become a target for the secret apparatus of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. "The range of tactics goes from harassment to murder," said Katia Roux at Amnesty International France. Spectacular acts like the poisoning of former Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal in Britain in 2018, or the killing in 2019 in Berlin of Georgian Chechen Zelimkhan Khangoshvili - attributed to Russia - get the world's attention, but much of the repression happens under the radar. "The threat perception of dictators or these repressive regimes has increased," said Marcus Michaelson, a researcher on authoritarianism at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels.Īccording to US watchdog Freedom House, there were at least 735 direct, physical incidents of transnational repression between 20, carried out by 36 governments, notably those of China, Turkey, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Rwanda.įour regimes joined the list in 2021, including Belarus, which diverted an aircraft to arrest an opposition figure.
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