In the summer of 2021, the Islamic Republic of Iran allegedly hired an operative to abduct journalist and women’s rights defender Masih Alinejad from her own front garden in Brooklyn and smuggle her back to Tehran, where the regime has branded her an enemy for her decades of defiance against compulsory veiling and political repression.
What is exceptional about Masih’s story is not that a repressive government ordered her kidnapping abroad, but that she survived the attempt. Others have been less fortunate: journalists poisoned in European capitals, airplanes forced out of the sky and dissident passengers disappeared, and activists gunned down in broad daylight on suburban streets where they believed distance meant safety.
We live in what one scholar has called “the golden age of transnational repression”—a practice in which governments reach beyond their borders to intimidate dissidents and diaspora communities living in other states. Since 2014, Freedom House has documented 1,375 such incidents across 107 countries, carried out by 54 governments against their own citizens in exile. These numbers have risen every year.
But even when the direct perpetrators are caught and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law—as Masih’s would-be kidnappers were—the statistics don’t go down. This is because transnational repression is, by definition, a leadership crime. It is not the spontaneous misconduct of rogue agents, but the deliberate exercise of state power, directed from the top, against individuals whose only transgression was to speak freely from the relative safety of exile.
International criminal law—the body of law built precisely to reach those who order atrocities, in addition to those who commit them directly—has never been seriously applied to transnational repression. This piece argues that it should be, and that the tools to do so may already exist.
A Problem Named but Not Solved
The international community has studied transnational repression (TNR) extensively, condemned it at the highest levels, and built policy frameworks to counter it. What it has not done is hold anyone criminally responsible for ordering it.
The European Parliament has debated it. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and various U.N. Special Rapporteurs have documented it. Forty-five states, led by the United States, signed a joint statement in 2024 at the Human Rights Council calling for coordinated action. The G7 has gone further still, declaring unequivocally that “TNR undermines national security, state sovereignty, the safety and human rights of victims, and principles of international law,” and condemning not only overt acts of physical violence but subtler forms of control, like the confiscation of passports to force dissidents home, the doxing of activists, and sexualized smear campaigns against women who speak out. To this end, the G7 has produced a comprehensive Compendium of Tools to Counter TNR, encouraging states to adopt legislative and policy measures grounded in a “whole-of-society approach.”
TNR is not a new phenomenon—high-profile cases like Operation Condor, the Mykonos restaurant assassinations, and Georgi Markov’s poisoning all preceded the current reckoning by decades—but there has never been political will of this breadth and visibility to confront it. Yet the question of criminal accountability for those who order these campaigns is conspicuously absent from this landscape of reports and resolutions. The focus has been on detection, disruption, and diplomatic pressure. Nobody is asking—at least as a formal matter—who bears criminal responsibility for directing TNR as a matter of state policy, or what legal framework could hold them accountable.
At its core, TNR refers to acts conducted or directed by a state or its proxies to silence, punish, or control individuals outside its territory, whether for political dissent, religious or ethnic identity, or simply for being deemed an undesirable element by the regime. An essential feature, then, is state direction. Its underlying elements—including assassinations, enforced disappearances, and persecution—are carried out by operatives. The decision to conduct a campaign of extraterritorial repression, to allocate state intelligence and security resources to it, and to sustain it across multiple operations and jurisdictions—in other words, to perpetrate a systematic attack against a civilian population—is necessarily made at the top.
A lone actor harassing an émigré does not constitute TNR. But the operative who attempted to kidnap Masih Alinejad did not act alone. Behind him was a chain of command, a budget, an intelligence apparatus, and, at the top of that chain, a person who ordered the kidnapping. It is that person—the official who authorized the operation, allocated the resources, and gave the order—who defines TNR for what it is, and who has never been held to account.
It follows that TNR ought to be placed in the same analytical category as atrocity offences that presuppose some level of organization. It is, inherently, a crime of command. That framing has a direct implication that the field has so far failed to reckon with: the existing legal responses to TNR—however sincere and however important—are structurally incapable of reaching those most responsible for it.
Gaps in Existing Responses
Criminal prosecutions represent the most serious attempt to date to hold perpetrators of TNR accountable. Authorities in Canada, Germany, South Africa, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States have brought domestic charges against operatives for carrying out underlying acts of TNR on their territory, and those charges matter.
Universal jurisdiction offers, in theory, one mechanism for reaching further up the chain of command. But universal jurisdiction has never reached—and structurally cannot reach—the officials who authorize TNR operations. For one, domestic universal jurisdiction legislation often requires the accused to be physically present in the prosecuting state. The commanders who direct TNR campaigns do not travel to jurisdictions where arrest is a realistic prospect. And even where universal jurisdiction could be characterised as “absolute,” as is the case in France and Germany, and political will exists to pursue senior officials, international law interposes a further barrier: sitting heads of state and senior officials enjoy broad immunity from criminal jurisdiction in foreign courts. The operatives who may be prosecuted are not the ones who made the decision to orchestrate a campaign of TNR, and the ones who made the decision are nearly impossible to prosecute, at least while they remain in office.
Targeted sanctions regimes, like those imposed in 2025 by the United States against six Beijing and Hong Kong authorities for their orchestration of acts of TNR, levy costs without generating criminal accountability. Travel bans and asset freezes can exact real consequences, but they carry no formal attribution of individual criminal responsibility. Their application is determined by the political calculations of sanctioning governments, which means they can be applied inconsistently and lifted under diplomatic pressure. More fundamentally, sanctions are not a strong enough deterrent. An official who calculates that the worst-case outcome is a travel restriction has not been given a sufficient reason to stop.
Finally, U.N. human rights fora, including treaty bodies and Charter-based mechanisms, provide essential work in documenting and decrying acts of TNR and developing normative standards. But they cannot prosecute. For a phenomenon whose perpetrators make explicit cost-benefit calculations about whether to proceed, a response that imposes no criminal cost is, at best, incomplete.
The result is a landscape of responses that generate visibility without accountability and leave the command architecture of TNR entirely intact. The architects of these campaigns have drawn a rational conclusion: the international community may document these crimes, prosecute the low-level operatives, sanction some of their associates, but it will do nothing to threaten their personal liberty. Until that calculation shifts, TNR will continue.
It was precisely to disrupt this pattern of impunity that the international criminal legal order was built. That architecture may be better positioned to respond to TNR than the field has recognised thus far.
Why International Criminal Law Can, and Should, Respond
The case for international criminal law involvement in prosecuting TNR rests on two foundations: a normative argument about its purpose, and a doctrinal argument that the necessary tools may already exist.
The normative case is straightforward. International criminal law (ICL) was built to protect individuals from the criminal exercise of state power and to ensure that those who order atrocities cannot hide behind their office. The dissident hunted across borders by the state she fled is precisely the kind of victim that framework was designed to protect, because she is someone for whom no other remedy exists. The perpetrating state will not prosecute its own officials. The host state may lack evidence or capacity. Universal jurisdiction, as discussed, may not be able to reach those who give the orders. But the same is not true of ICL; Article 27 of the Rome Statute explicitly exempts head of state and official immunity. If ICL cannot respond, nothing can.
But the case for extending ICL’s reach to TNR is not only about individual victims. From its inception, ICL has also been concerned with the integrity of the international order, and specifically with protecting state sovereignty from acts of aggression. Nuremberg was not only—and, in many ways, not even primarily—a response to the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany against civilians. It was, in the words of chief prosecutor Robert Jackson, “mankind’s desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the foundations of the world’s peace and to commit aggressions against the rights of their neighbors.”
TNR strikes at precisely these foundational principles. When one state sends agents to assassinate, abduct, or intimidate individuals on the territory of another, it not only harms those individuals and their communities, but it violates the sovereignty of the host state, seriously undermines the norm of non-interference, and treats foreign territory as an extension of its own repressive apparatus.
The doctrinal case requires significant development, but its foundation is stronger than is commonly assumed. The underlying acts of TNR—assassinations, enforced disappearances, persecution on political, ethnic, or religious grounds—already qualify as covered offences under the Rome Statute, most plausibly as crimes against humanity when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population. The analytical work of establishing that connection rigorously, including the specific modes of liability that attach to those who order TNR operations, remains to be done, and this piece calls for the field to do it. What we seek to establish here is that the jurisdictional foundation for that work is already in place.
Per Article 12(2)(a) of the Rome Statute, a precondition to the ICC’s jurisdiction is that the alleged crime was committed “on the territory” of a state party. TNR operations produce their effects where the victim is located—that is, on the soil of the host state. If that host state is a party to the Rome Statute, the jurisdictional hook has always potentially been there. The ICC Pre-Trial Chamber confirmed precisely this logic in the Bangladesh/Myanmar situation, holding that jurisdiction attaches where at least one element of a crime, or its effects, occurs on state party territory, even where the conduct originates in a non-party state.
The implication for the prosecution of TNR is significant. The primary perpetrating states are overwhelmingly non-parties to the Rome Statute. Yet their conduct and their victims are very frequently located in countries that are parties to the Statute (with the notable exception of the United States). The jurisdictional gap that many assume exists may, in fact, be far narrower than supposed. If a particular case of TNR otherwise meets all of the elements for a mode of liability already available in the Rome Statute, in particular as a potential crime against humanity, the Court may act.
The co-authors are not unmindful of intelligence sharing constraints and national security limitations that may preclude affected states from supplying the ICC with relevant evidence. Nonetheless, the critical mass of TNR incidents that may fall within the ICC’s jurisdiction, together with other available evidentiary sources, supports concrete next steps: affected states, individually or jointly, should refer TNR cases to the ICC under Articles 14 and 15 of the Rome Statute, and the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor should treat TNR as a phenomenon warranting serious preliminary examination.
Conclusion
The silence of international criminal law on TNR is not a principled legal conclusion. It is a gap in the scholarly and jurisprudential record, and in the imagination of the field. It has persisted not because the tools are demonstrably absent—indeed, our preliminary research suggests that they are not—but because the question has not yet been seriously posed.
The cost of that silence is human. Dissidents around the world continue to adjust their routines, triple check their locks, and look over their shoulder, because the officials who ordered these campaigns have learned that they will never be held personally to account. As long as the architects of TNR face no criminal accountability, that will remain the case.
The tools to disrupt this pattern of impunity may already exist in international criminal legal fora. The work of establishing whether they do—and of building the legal foundation to use them—should begin now.
