cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11005528
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In 2026, Freedom House reported 1,375 incidents [of Transnational Repression, TNR] between 2014 and 2025 committed by 54 governments, with China identified as the leading perpetrator.
Publicly documented incidents reflect only a small glimpse of China’s TNR, however. China’s TNR often operates in deniable and socially embedded ways, exploiting vulnerabilities that obstruct reporting: legal status, family exposure, lack of trusted community or institutional reporting channels, or fear of retaliation. Unreported instances, cases that may fall below criminal thresholds, and the experiences of individuals who lack the capacity to document or trusted reporting channels often remain unaccounted for in public discourse. As a result, a significant gap remains between widespread societal understanding and the actual scope of the problem.
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In March 2026, HRF [Human Rights Foundation] hosted a private workshop in Belgium to enhance young activists’ knowledge of advocacy and protection tools, create resilience strategies for their communities, and build cross-movement solidarity to transform recurring TNR threats into collective peaceful resistance across borders.
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Across different legal statuses and community backgrounds, Europe-based workshop participants consistently described experiences or fears of being targeted, surveilled, intimidated, or pressured by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] and its proxies, yet few have ever formally reported a case. Their accounts point to an information and protection gap within the EU in the context of China’s TNR, despite being a clear violation of non-derogable fundamental human rights and a threat to the rule of law of the states where those individuals live and have found refuge.
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Several salient public cases illustrate the broader pattern of how young human rights activists are targeted by the CCP within the European Union:
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2026: Coercion Below the Criminal Threshold
In January 2026, a man claiming to be a government official from Urumchi contacted Paris-based Uyghur activist Mirkamil Tutghun and ordered him to stop his activism. The caller presented disengagement from activism as a safe pathway towards being reunited with his family in China.5 The same caller had reportedly pressured another Uyghur activist, Abdurahman Tohti, to monitor activities at the European Uyghur Institute6, a leading Uyghur advocacy organization based in Paris. The institute’s founder, Dilnur Reyhan, had previously faced repeated government harassment, including a PRC embassy-initiated complaint to a court in Paris for Dilnur’s participation in a protest, which resulted in a conviction and a small fine7. Informal calls of this kind — from individuals claiming to be government officials, or even family members in China — can easily fall under the criminal threshold in the absence of overt physical violence or explicit threats.
Mirkamil’s case reflects the experience of many Uyghur youth in the diaspora who are unable to return home or maintain ordinary contact with their immediate families left behind. Using this family connection, the PRC’s TNR operates as a deniable instrument of recruitment, surveillance, information extraction, and behavioral control, directly chilling association, expression, and community life in European jurisdictions.
The embassy-initiated proceeding against Dilnur then extends the pattern through lawfare: when a foreign authoritarian state triggers the host country’s own legal system against a diaspora advocate for public-interest protest, the process itself can impose psychological, financial, and reputational costs that chill political expression. Therefore, the procedural validity of the complaint does not exhaust the TNR context; the embassy’s role, the political nature of the expression, and the broader pattern of China’s pressure should inform any assessment of proportionality and chilling effect.
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