Tackling states’ attempts to silence critics abroad
International human-rights lawyer Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC has told a conference at the Law Society that the issue of transnational repression (TNR) requires “urgent” action and is becoming an increasing problem – in Ireland as well as internationally.
TNR refers to attempts by states to silence critics based in other countries – including the targeting of refugees in their new home countries.
Gallagher, who is also Ireland’s Special Rapporteur on Child Protection, was speaking on the second day of a summer school on ‘Defending Democracy: Legal Responses to Emerging Threats’ hosted by the Law Society’s Centre for Justice and Law Reform at Blackhall Place (26-27 June).
She cited examples that included the case of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
‘More sophisticated’ methods
The human-rights lawyer told the event that the practice, while not new, had become more sophisticated, listing six methods commonly used by authoritarian regimes against critics based abroad:
- Physical attacks,
- Physical surveillance,
- Online or remote threats, such as the use of spyware,
- Mobility impediments, such as travel bans or the cancellation of passports,
- Co-opting other countries to target individuals, through actions such as unjustified extradition requests, and
- ‘Proxy persecution’, which sometimes involved targeting family members or friends still living in the critic’s country of origin.
She said that female journalists, in particular, often faced additional misogynistic abuse.
Gallagher named China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Rwanda, and Turkey as countries that commonly used such tactics.
‘Here-and-now’ problem in Ireland
Examining responses to the problem in various jurisdictions, she described the EU’s approach as “patchwork” and “uncoordinated”, adding that there was also a lack of effective information-sharing on TNR between various international agencies.
Citing recent reports of a shadow Chinese police station operating in Dublin, the human-rights lawyers told the event that TNR was a “here-and-now” problem in Ireland, and called for an urgent audit of the issue to understand the problem.
She added that we also needed to look at ways of using existing Irish and EU policy and legislative tools to tackle the issue – including ways of taking on individuals or organisations based in EU states who facilitated or enabled TNR.
Gallagher also called for sophisticated country-specific measures – “the aggressor states are creative; we need to get creative too,” she concluded.