There is a compelling idea that when you escape from an authoritarian regime you are safe. This may have been perpetuated by Hollywood: prisoners handed over at checkpoints are a common trope. Even The Sound of Music’s Von Trapp family singers have added to this body of evidence.

Sadly, the reality is rather different – getting through the border is no longer a guarantee of safety and as we examine in the latest issue of our magazine, it is becoming a global problem.

It’s never really been safe going abroad, especially if your Government believes you remain a threat or is just vengeful.

In 1979, we reported on the inquest into the death of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov. After leaving his native country, he worked in London as a journalist for the BBC and others. On 11 September 1978 he died of blood poisoning after an incident at a London bus stop when he was jabbed in the leg by a man with an umbrella”. The inquest found that his death was caused by a metal pellet containing the nerve agent ricin, presumably implanted into his leg by the umbrella. The KGB defector Oleg Kalugin later claimed that the hit had been organised by the Bulgarian Secret Service in conjunction with his former Soviet employers.

The attempted poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury by Russian GRU agents using Novichok nerve agent in 2018 showed that little had changed in the intervening near four decades. Again, it was a storyline that could have easily been written for a Bond movie.

The murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul that same year showed that it’s not just the Russians who are in the game of transnational repression (TR). In 2021, the US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines issued a report that stated: “We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation…to capture or kill…Khashoggi”.

It goes on. In March this year, journalist Pouria Zeraati, a host on London-based, Farsi-language TV channel Iran International, was assaulted by a group of unidentified individuals. He was left with numerous knife wounds across his body. While the perpetrators have not been identified and brought to justice, the signs are there to suggest that this was an egregious case of TR, when the long arm of dictators reach beyond their borders to attempt to silence their critics. In 2022, Iran’s intelligence minister Esmail Khatib was reported to have told the official website of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei that Iran International is  “a terrorist organisation” and that its employees would “be pursued by the Ministry of Intelligence”.

China is also in the TR business, as we revealed in our 2022 report China’s Long Arm which looked at the repression of Uyghurs in Europe.The as-yet unexplained death in a park in Maidenhead, west of London, of a former Royal Marine who has been accused of spying on pro-democracy activists for the Hong Kong intelligence services has also renewed the focus on transnational repression. It is not clear who, if anyone, is involved at this stage but it needs to be investigated thoroughly.

The long reach of authoritarian regimes will surely be among the discussion points at an event Index is holding next Wednesday, 29 May, the opening night of the Censored Memories exhibition at St John’s Church in London’s Waterloo. Find out more below or get a free ticket here.

While we’re talking about protest, it would be difficult to avoid mentioning the events in 10 Downing Street on Wednesday afternoon. Just after 5pm, during a heavy downpour, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that he was calling a general election. Viewers were (mostly) amused to hear Sunak accompanied by the blaring (or should that be Blairing) music of D:Ream singing Things Can Only Get Better played by anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray. Bray told The Guardian that the nineties hit, famously used by New Labour, is “the top trolling song for the Conservatives”. We predict that protests and the response to them will be top of the agenda for the new government, whoever ends up forming it.

Mark Stimpson, Associate editor