Pakistan Transnational Repression
repression—the practice by which governments extend coercion beyond their borders to silence
critics, intimidate dissidents, and obstruct accountability. What defines Pakistan’s case is not an
isolated incident but a pattern: sustained harassment, threats, surveillance, and violence directed at
exiled journalists, activists, lawyers, and academics, particularly those from Baloch, Pashtun, and
Sindhi communities, now living in the United Kingdom and Europe.
This repression does not originate abroad. It is an extension of domestic practices, most notably
enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, torture, and the criminalisation of dissent. When such
practices become normalized inside a state, exile does not interrupt them—it internationalizes them.
Critics who leave Pakistan often find that distance offers no protection. Instead, repression adapts,
manifesting as anonymous threats, digital harassment, intimidation through family members at
home, break-ins, and institutional pressure designed to isolate and exhaust the target.
One of the clearest recent examples in the UK is the case of Roshaan Khattak, an Oscar-nominated
filmmaker and academic whose doctoral research focuses on enforced disappearances and mass
violence in Balochistan. While based in Cambridge, Khattak received explicit threats warning that
neither the UK nor a prestigious university could protect him. Rather than being shielded, he reports
facing obstruction: accommodation withdrawn without notice, unexplained access to his room while
abroad, compromised research materials, and warnings that external pressure—linked to the
Pakistani state—was being exerted over his work. His case illustrates how transnational repression
can operate through institutions, not only through overt violence.
Khattak’s experience is not unique. Shahzad Akbar, a former Pakistani federal minister and
prominent critic of the military establishment living in the UK, has faced escalating attacks: a rare
acid assault, followed by a violent beating at his home, and later an attempted arson attack. The
sequence—first the body, then the home—fits a familiar logic of intimidation meant to mark, warn,
and silence. Protection proved inadequate; accountability remained absent.
Similarly, Adil Farooq Raja, a journalist and former army officer turned outspoken critic, saw his
UK home broken into and ransacked. To those familiar with transnational repression, such incidents
are rarely random burglaries; they are pressure without fingerprints, menace calibrated to remain
just deniable enough to evade consequence.
Beyond the UK, the pattern extends across borders. Karima Baloch was found dead in Canada in
2020 after years of threats in exile. Sajid Hussain, a journalist who fled Pakistan, disappeared in
Sweden and was later found dead in a river. In another case, European authorities thwarted an
assassination plot against Dutch-based dissident Waqas Goraya, originating from the UK. Each case
differs in detail, but together they form a coherent pattern: pressure, disappearance, or violence
following critics beyond Pakistan’s borders.
International bodies have begun to recognise this continuity. In 2025, the UN Human Rights
Office issued its first-ever guidance on transnational repression, warning that states may be
responsible for cross-border intimidation even when acting through proxies or informal networks.
While not naming Pakistan, the practices described—threats against exiles, harassment abroad,
pressure on families at home, and abuse of counterterrorism narratives—closely mirror allegations
repeatedly raised against it. Human rights organisations such as Amnesty International have
similarly warned that enforced disappearances and intimidation form part of a single system of
repression that adapts rather than ends when critics flee.
What makes Pakistan’s transnational repression particularly dangerous is its continuity and
impunity. The same apparatus accused of disappearing hundreds of people each year inside the
country does not relinquish control when its targets cross borders; it refines its methods. Violence
may be replaced by pressure, detention by intimidation, disappearance by uncertainty—but the
objective remains the same: silence.
Transnational repression thrives on hesitation—by universities that manage risk instead of
defending academic freedom, by governments reluctant to confront a security partner, and by legal
systems slow to adapt to borderless coercion. Pakistan’s case exposes the cost of that hesitation with
brutal clarity. As long as enforced disappearances continue at home without consequence,
repression abroad will remain not an aberration, but a logical extension.
The lesson is stark: exile is no longer an escape; it is merely another terrain. And unless
transnational repression is named, confronted, and penalized with the seriousness it demands,
impunity will continue to travel—quietly, efficiently, and across borders.
