Examination of witnesses

Martin Plaut, James Lynch and Susan Coughtrie.

Q36 The Chair: Our committee, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which comprises 12 members, welcomes Lord Sewell to his first meeting as a new member. This committee is charged by Parliament with the responsibility to look at policies and legislation that may impact the human rights of British citizens or people resident in the United Kingdom. We consider how conventions that the UK has ratified have been honoured—everything from the Convention on the Rights of the Child to the convention on the crime of genocide and the convention on the treatment of refugees. We sometimes shine a light on specific pieces of new legislation, as we are currently doing with the Mental Health Bill. We carry out thematic or longer inquiries, as we are currently doing on the failure to bring to justice some of the British genocidaires who were responsible for atrocities against minorities such as the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria. We are also doing an inquiry into modern-day slavery and supply chain transparency—an issue that the House of Commons was considering yesterday and which will be before the House of Lords in a debate on Friday.

Today’s inquiry into transnational repression is the third of our thematic inquiries. This is an increasingly prevalent concern as the long arms of dictatorships and totalitarian states extend beyond their borders and into our jurisdictions. We have heard disturbing evidence from witnesses such as Chloe Cheung, the young woman who has had a bounty placed on her head by the CCP regime in Hong Kong, and Hossein Abedini, the Iranian pro-democracy activist who survived an assassination attempt.

To help us understand this issue and what more democracies such as the United Kingdom can do to safeguard our citizens and free speech, we have three distinguished panellists joining us here today: Mr Martin Plaut, who is a journalist and visiting senior fellow at King’s College London; Susan Coughtrie, who is the director of the Foreign Policy Centre and is joining us online; and James Lynch, who is the co-director at FairSquare. Let me say a word more about each of our panellists.

Martin is a journalist specialising in the Horn of Africa and southern Africa. He was appointed as Africa editor for the BBC World Service in 2003 and retired from the BBC in 2013. He subsequently joined King’s College as a visiting senior research fellow. He has advised the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the US State Department and the European Parliament. He was an associate fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, leading its Africa research programme, and he continues to be an active member of both Chatham House and the Royal United Services Institute.

Susan Coughtrie has been the director of the Foreign Policy Centre since January 2023. She was previously the director of the Unsafe for Scrutiny project, which explores the risks and threats facing journalists uncovering financial crime and corruption. The findings of this research led to her co-founding the UK Anti-Slapp Coalition in January 2021, which she continues to chair.

Mr James Lynch is the founding co-director of FairSquare, which researches and advocates on political repression, labour migration and accountability in sport. It focuses on Europe, the Middle East and south Asia. Mr Lynch was previously the deputy director at Amnesty International and has also worked for the UK Foreign Office.

If I may, I will ask you a curtain-raising, scene-setting question; I invite you to respond in the order in which I just introduced you. In your work, what are the main forms of transnational repression that you have seen in the United Kingdom and that countries have perpetrated? Have you noticed a recent increase in the number of incidences of transnational repression taking place in the United Kingdom?

Martin Plaut: Thank you for taking the time and trouble to investigate what I think is a really important issue. I will begin by saying a few things about Rwanda then move on to Eritrea, which I know much better. The situation in Rwanda is very serious and worrying in two respects. First, there is a long history of Rwanda threatening and attempting to kill people in London. There is a 2011 Times article that talks about a hit squad being sent to London to kill people on the streets. I have here threat-to-life warnings issued in 2011 to named individuals; I will provide these to the committee but I ask that the names be withheld, for obvious reasons. There, the Metropolitan Police says that reliable evidence states that the Rwandan Government pose “an imminent threat to your life” and that “the threat could come in any form”. These are official documents.

Much more recently, in the last day or so, there was an attempt by the Rwandan authorities to use the other end of the threat—artificial intelligence—to produce tweets to attack members of the establishment in Belgium, because the Belgians have broken off diplomatic relations; this includes Ministers who have been attacked by them. They use artificial intelligence to do it. This goes back a very long time. What has been worrying is the evidence that the British Government have been remarkably uninterested in all of these affairs.

Turning to Eritrea, the situation is extremely serious because, as you will be aware, Eritrea is probably Africa’s most repressive country, having never had an election and having no form of democratic accountability or independent press at all. Its president, Isaias Afwerki, who has ruled it since he took Asmara in 1991, has no intention of holding elections and says so. It is in those circumstances that it then exports its repression across the world; this has been documented for many years. There is an outstanding report by Amnesty International, which is some years old now but provides a very good analysis of what was taking place.

To bring things right up to date, there have been, today, search warrants issued by the German federal authorities against 19 premises of one of the opposition groups. It is called Brigade Nhamedu; it is a group of young people who have done a lot of things, including trying to resist attempts by the Eritrean Government to raise funds and raise their political profile abroad, including in the United Kingdom. This has resulted in clashes on the streets of London but, more importantly, in Israel, in Germany and in the Scandinavian countries.

Anyway, the federal authorities have issued these warrants against these people because they say that they are attempting to undermine the Eritrean Government, which Brigade Nhamedu makes no bones about. They are indeed doing that, and there have been clashes. I am not trying to apportion blame in all of this but it is strange that the German Government have not done anything to halt the other side of these clashes, which are fomented by the Eritrean Government through their embassy and the single party, the PFDJ. The Eritrean festivals, which they support, are absolutely essential to the Eritrean Government for the simple reason that the diaspora provides one-third of all the of income that the Eritrean Government live on. So they have to maintain their control of the diaspora; attempts to challenge this go to the heart of their existence, which is why they have reacted so vociferously against them. I wrote a paper that analyses this and goes through all the festivals where there have been these events.

This is how the Eritreans export their repression across borders, not just in Europe but particularly in places such as Kenya and Sudan. There is lots of evidence of this. In places such as Sudan and Kenya, this can be up to and including kidnapping and assassination. Those things have not happened in Europe or in places such as Israel or the United States, where there have been these clashes, but people are certainly leant on. If they want any assistance from the Eritrean Government whatever, they have to comply. They have to pay a 2% tax on all their income from the moment they arrive in that country to the Government before they get any assistance. I will leave it there then answer any questions.

Q37 The Chair: Thank you for the offer of providing further information; of course, we will redact names from that. If the paper that you referred to a moment ago, which you wrote, could be given to us as well, it can be included in our papers. You might be interested to know that we have received a formal written submission from the United Nations special rapporteur on Eritrea. He, too, raises the worrying coercion that is placed on the diaspora in the United Kingdom, so I know colleagues will want to ask you more about that as we proceed.

James Lynch: I primarily work on transnational repression relating to Arab states. In our written submission, we submitted information on Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, jointly with ALQST for Human Rights and the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy; I want to say that because quite a few of my insights rely on their hard work.

One thing to flag up front is that these are all fairly close partners of the UK Government, whether on security, defence or economy; that comes through a bit when we look at the response later. In terms of the practices, they are quite varied, but I highlight a couple of big themes. We have examples of some of the more extreme physical intimidation and violence on the streets of the UK. There was a 2018 case of a Saudi activist who was attacked by two men. In that case, a High Court judge clarified in effect that this looked to be linked to a state; he found that in a civil case around hacking.

The other aspect I would highlight, in terms of actions actually taking place on UK soil, is digital surveillance. I know that we may talk about that in more detail but I want to highlight how these two things are linked. There is some evidence that, when there have been incidents of people being tracked physically or having some kind of intimidation physically, they may have been under digital surveillance at the same time. One trend I notice with this transnational repression generally is that a lot of the common practices are linked; people often face many of these practices at once.

There are activities by these states on UK soil, definitely within UK jurisdiction. However, in the majority of the cases I have looked at, we see people in the UK—either resident in the UK or, sometimes, UK nationals—face what I would say is remote transnational repression, in the sense that the activities are primarily taking place in the repressing state. For example, people in the UK have baseless court cases against them and are designated terrorists, with all sorts of effects on their lives, reputations and ability to bank, for example. I have heard of an Egyptian being debanked because of a court case against him. They are unable to travel through potential fear of arrest when they travel.

People have their relatives targeted for arrest or put under a travel ban because of what they do here in the UK. We have had cases like that in Bahrain and Egypt. People have their citizenship stripped and are then unable to pass any citizenship on to their children as a result. We have had cases of that kind documented with regard to Bahrain. Then there are threats from people who are either known or unknown. Often, that could be online, on social media, but there are phone calls as well. Again, those threats can coincide with the other forms that we are describing. If somebody is tailed physically, they may find that they are suddenly getting messages online about that.

Sometimes, when you express one of these practices, it can seem almost manageable. One thing about activists who are subject to these practices is that they are sometimes very stoic people. They have chosen the life of an activist or a political dissident so they tend to play this down. They are working and advocating for people in their home countries who are doing life sentences in jail. They are stoic people, but it is clear that they often face multiple of these practices at once. It has a debilitating effect on their lives and their families’ lives. It takes a toll. They are on constant alert. It is very difficult to explain these things to people because it is poorly understood by the society around them.

For others who are not the most prominent activists, that creates a serious chill factor. This is something that people talk about all the time. The diaspora groups in this country, because of what they see happening to others, decline to take part in anything that might look political or any kind of public participation in life in this country. I heard nationals of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, in particular, talk about a pervasive sense of control and monitoring of the diaspora by their Governments. That could be through apps that they are supposed to sign on to, in order to say where they are, or it could be through student societies that they are supposed to do all their socialising through. It is really extending through their social life and creating a sense that they are under observation.

Then you have this other kind of case, which concerns people who express themselves by legitimately using the freedom of expression that is available in the UK and who then travel back to the home country and unknowingly find themselves facing consequences there. A British national is detained arbitrarily in jail in Saudi Arabia right now because, it seems, of a deleted social media post and a friendship with someone related to a Saudi dissident. There are people on travel bans in the UAE because they went to a seminar in a university in this country and took part.

Before I talk about the increase in the prevalence, I have a quote from one Egyptian human rights researcher who summed this up. He said, “I did not come here to this country to stay quiet but, the other day, my father, who lives in Egypt, called me and told me that I had to delete my social media post because he was worried”. His father has previously been arrested because of his work. That is the chill factor that may be repressing the freedom of expression among these communities.

In terms of numbers, it is really hard to estimate. A few get into the media when there is something dramatic. The numbers are likely to be far higher than we assume. By the way, with everybody you speak to about this, once you start asking them, they say, “Oh yes, I have a friend and this happened to him. I heard about this guy’s case”. A lot of this, because it can feel low-level compared to what is happening in the home country, does not surface. We can say that, since the beginning of the 2010s, when the Arab world saw uprisings, protests and a repressive turn by a number of Governments, to some degree, the political arena has shifted more to the outside—to the external arena—and into Europe and North America, so the repression has moved there. That is the end of my comments.

The Chair: That certainly sets the scene very well for us. This chill factor that you are describing comes out again and again in the evidence that the committee has been receiving.

Let us see if we can reach Ms Coughtrie. No, we cannot hear her, I am afraid. I suggest that she leaves the call then comes back into it; that works wonders sometimes. We are really sorry but the technology is failing us. We will move on to the next question but we will not lose sight of you, Ms Coughtrie—even though we have lost sight of you online—and we will come back to you. Sir Desmond Swayne has the first of our more detailed questions.

Q38 Sir Desmond Swayne: In essence, I have two questions. First, to what extent do the offending jurisdictions co-operate with one another to get hold of and intimidate their respective nationals? Secondly, what is the impact of new, improved technology—in terms of telecommunications, surveillance and computer technologies—on extending that malevolent finger and intimidating and silencing their citizens?

James Lynch: In terms of the co-operation between the repressing states and authoritarian states, there is definitely learning. The security services of the countries that I am focused on certainly talk to each other very closely. Within the region, you see that co-operation getting deeper and deeper. There is something called the Arab Interior Ministers’ Council, which is a kind of Arab League Interpol. Interpol comes in for a lot of scrutiny and criticism—I am sure that this committee will hear about that—but this is Interpol without the independent mechanisms and oversight.

It connects between the different Governments and goes straight to the Ministry of Interior, so it does not even rely on people crossing a border. It could be any interaction with the state, and people can be picked up and arrested. We have seen the UAE and Saudi Arabia in particular using that to bring in dissidents who thought they were safe in Lebanon, Jordan and Morocco. There have been some prominent cases recently; it is a growing trend. It means that, for example, Arab activists or political dissidents in this country, generally speaking, cannot and will not go to other Arab states. That probably tells you a lot about the growing co-operation.

For me, it is a great worry when we have cases such as that of Abdelrahman Ayyash, a UK-based human rights researcher from Egypt. His asylum claim was rejected on the basis that he had a family link to Saudi Arabia and could return to Saudi Arabia. Anyone who has looked at what Saudi Arabia does to Egyptian political dissidents or human rights researchers will know that they get returned to Egypt. Fortunately, that decision has been overturned—he now, rightly, has asylum and a travel document—but it has left him wondering, “What would the UK do? Where can I travel?” That is something to look out for.

More generally, authoritarian states are always learning from each other. One thing that a number of people from the UAE and Saudi Arabia have said to me is that there is a lot of looking at what China is doing in this respect. Certainly, some of the conversations I have had around student societies and the kind of monitoring that may be going on there in our universities sounds a bit like there has been modelling on the Chinese approach.

Martin Plaut: To answer your question about artificial intelligence and the social media that is used to monitor people, the Government in Rwanda—as I mentioned in the document that I will provide for you—certainly use it to attack personalities outside their own country, but they also monitor every social media that exists. The same is true with the Eritreans. They are very aware of what goes on out there and will use those means to intimidate people and attack them.

The Eritreans have, since the 1970s, developed two different forms of approach to dissidents. They have one committee called Zero Three and another called Zero Nine. Zero Three, if I have them in the right order, starts rumours about you and starts saying, “We noticed that he was particularly interested in little boys. Isn’t that strange?”, to get the idea out that you are perhaps an undesirable person.

Subsequently, if you do not fall in line and are not sufficiently undermined, they will take you out. That certainly happened during their 30‑year war of independence against Ethiopia, when they assassinated a lot of people who they did not get on with inside their own movement. Do not forget that the Eritreans, like a number of other countries in Africa, have a Marxist-Leninist system of control where they have an external party and an internal Leninist party that actually runs everything. That is the way they operate it, and they use it to attack anybody. They are perfectly happy to do that. Externally, I am constantly under attack on social media, but I have a thick skin and do not really mind. They do it with anybody that they can.

Do they co-operate with other nations? Yes, they do. It is difficult to pin this down, but the Eritreans are certainly very well connected across the Red Sea and have shifting alliances with both the Saudis and the UAE. They certainly co-operate. They are quite happy to pick up people in countries if they have to. Ethiopia, for example, did that with a key dissident. He was seized in the Gulf then brought by force back to Ethiopia; that happens all the time, with their support. If people are dissidents, they have to be extremely careful where they are basing themselves if they do not want to find themselves in serious trouble. That gives you an idea.

Of course, one should not forget the role of the Wagner Group, which is also important in Africa inasmuch as it lays a groundwork of social media activity before it engages physically with a country or nation. It is very active there.

The other thing that countries have increasingly been doing is turning, frankly, to the Israelis for the software that they require in order to monitor their citizens abroad. The Israelis are past masters at producing it and will sell it to almost anybody, as far as I can see, who is willing to pay. They use it to monitor activities abroad. One should not forget that, for example, the Rwandans murdered a senior general who had gone into opposition in South Africa. They are quite capable of monitoring, through a sophisticated system, people across the world, wherever they see opposition, then taking action as they see fit.

The Chair: Can we go back to Ms Coughtrie now to see whether we have her online? If we have, perhaps she could make her preliminary remarks but also pick up the question that Sir Desmond Swayne asked before about surveillance technology and the co-operation between authoritarian states.

Susan Coughtrie: Thank you very much for holding this inquiry and for the invitation. As Lord Alton mentioned at the beginning, I lead a project called Unsafe for Scrutiny, which looks at risks and threats to journalists who uncover financial crime and corruption. My entry point into that and the inspiration for the project was the work I did for Article 19, which is an international free expression organisation. I worked for the best part of a decade on, in particular, Russia and other former Soviet Union countries.

To start, I will keep my remarks largely to journalists and Russia, although this issue is of course global and affects many people. In the Unsafe for Scrutiny project, we did a global survey in 2020 that asked 63 journalists in 41 countries who uncover financial crime and corruption about the types of risks and threats they were facing. Unfortunately, more than 70% were facing some form of attack, ranging from physical attack to online and offline surveillance and smear campaigns. It basically ran the whole gamut.

Two things particularly came out from that survey. One was that legal threats were increasingly being used as a form of harassment and to shut down information in the public interest. Over 70% of the people who responded were facing some kind of legal challenge to their reporting. The second part was that the UK was identified as the leading international source of those legal threats—almost as high as those coming from EU countries and the US combined. That finding is what led us to establish the UK Anti-Slapp Coalition in 2021.

SLAPPs, for those who are unfamiliar, is an acronym that stands for strategic lawsuits against public participation. It is a term that was invented by US academics in the early 1990s, but it has increasingly been used in Europe and the UK over the past five or six years. It is an old problem with new framing, rather than a totally new thing, but it intersects with transnational repression. Not all SLAPPs are cross-border, nor can they be seen to be utilised in this way, but there are definitely some cases that we look at where we can see how they have been used by foreign actors—or those who are closely affiliated with them—including among the political business elites. There is a considerable interplay and they share a number of the same aims, particularly when it comes to shutting down independent reporting or critical voices.

I can speak specifically about Russia. Russia has been known for a long time to have been particularly aggressive in its transnational repression activities, running the gamut from murders that have been conducted on UK soil to the other side of the spectrum of things that are perhaps less visible, or have been less visible up until now—including legal threats, as I mentioned, but also smear campaigns, online and offline surveillance, and, to a certain extent, co-ordinated online trolling. What has been of particular concern in our research over recent years is not just that these actions are being carried out but the extent to which UK law firms, PR agencies and private investigative companies are, in our view, complicit in supporting this harassment of journalists and others. That has been a particular finding.

Following on from James’s point regarding the fact that you do not see these things happening in isolation, we started researching SLAPP cases and legal cases and looking at journalists who were facing legal cases. Every time, we found that there were other forms of harassment and attack happening alongside it. It creates a real system in which these journalists and others are operating, in terms of amplifying the pressure that they are under.

I will now speak about a couple of the legal cases. We saw how, sometimes, alongside a legal case, a Twitter account might be set up. Often, it follows only the journalist or the close network of that journalist, and it specifically targets everyday comments about the case or the journalist. We have also seen in other cases huge online mass campaigns with anonymous accounts that are clearly being directed towards a particular actor. I am happy to speak to a couple of particular examples but I will be guided by you as to what would be most helpful at this point.

The Chair: It would be helpful to us to have some examples. If we are not able to cover them in the course of the further questions that will be put to you by the committee, Ms Coughtrie, it would be very helpful if you could send those to us in writing. They can then be included in the evidence and help to inform our report. I am glad that we were able to overcome the technical difficulties and have you online.

James Lynch: I am conscious that I forgot to answer the question about surveillance and technology. I wonder whether I could give a very short comment.

The Chair: I am conscious also that colleagues have a lot of other questions that they want to ask. I am sure that, if you want to include that a bit later on, that will be fine.

Q39 Lord Sewell of Sanderstead: I want to ask about the issue of diaspora. Diaspora communities have traditionally had what I would call a kinship role; that may be through money being sent from abroad, marriage or other ways of linking communities. One would ask about the police being a place to turn to, in terms of reporting this, but it is also an easy place to smuggle yourself if you want to do nefarious activities. To what extent do you think the police have a role, successful or not, in making sure that this thing does not happen and the victims are not increased? It can be on lots of levels, from drug abuse through to murder, as you said.

James Lynch: In my experience, when people come forward and have this problem or have some incident to report, it is the police whom they are told to go to. For example, last year, the Middle East Minister at the Foreign Office told my organisation in a letter, when we reported a case, that the person should go to the police. We now have a situation where this is a criminal act under the National Security Act, so that, to some degree, makes a lot of sense. The police must have a role to play.

However, people tend to say that you get police who are supportive and empathetic and listen. You also get police who do not take this seriously because they do not understand the context. People work hard to explain the context but, sometimes, people describe the police giving them sarcastic, dismissive responses—maybe thinking that this is Walter Mitty stuff. In terms of what actually happens, in our experience, unless things are quite dramatic and tip into the area where the police feel that an investigation is possible and that there might be some chance of a viable case being built, things tend to get closed pretty quickly and the person hears no more about it.

We have also heard of cases where the police are telling people, “You should keep a lower profile”. Someone who was in the Saudi security services, then came here and started speaking out, got an email that said, “You should adopt a profile like Edward Snowden”, which seemed to be saying, “You should keep quiet”. That has the unfortunate effect of almost reinforcing what the repression is there to do: make people be quieter.

There are obviously cases—maybe Martin and Susan will speak to these—where things reach a dramatic peak and the police are perhaps more actively involved. We certainly know about cases such as that with Iran, for example. Where it is less than that, the problem is that it is never going to be of that much interest to the police. Because you are talking to somebody who does not necessarily have a background in the politics of the country in question, it is never going to go very far, so the victims decide that it is not worth it.

The founder of ALQST for Human Rights, who is a Saudi national, has been targeted in a number of ways. He says that, now, unless it is really at the most serious threshold, he does not waste his time going to the police about it. He had an incident where he found a knife in his front garden. He opened his mobile phone and his social media feed was full of emojis of knives, clearly emanating from Saudi-linked accounts. When he could not get that taken seriously by the police, he felt, “Okay, it’s generally not worth it”. That is the picture.

Lord Sewell of Sanderstead: Martin, have you done research? It is a popular view that, in fact, the police are avoiding these issues politically because their own politics are such that they would not want to be accused of being racist, et cetera, so they avoid those kinds of interactions. Do you think any of that is true?

Martin Plaut: Can I take you through one particular case, which perhaps highlights the problem? It took place a few years ago and related to Resolution 2023, which was passed by the Security Council and in which the council “condemns the use of the ‘Diaspora tax’ on Eritrean diaspora by the Eritrean Government to destabilise the Horn of Africa region or violate relevant resolutions, including 1844 (2008), 1862 (2009) and 1907 (2009), including for purposes such as procuring arms and related materiel for transfer to armed opposition groups … and decides that Eritrea shall cease these practices”. It further “decides that Eritrea shall cease using extortion, threats of violence, fraud and other illicit means to collect taxes outside of Eritrea from its nationals or other individuals of Eritrean descent”. That has passed, and Britain votes in favour of it.

In 2014, Baroness Hayter asked a Question to ask the then Government what action would be taken to enforce that resolution, which outlaws the 2% tax. Baroness Warsi replied by saying that there had been a meeting in which “officials from the FCO, the National Crime Agency and West Yorkshire Police met members of the Eritrean Diaspora to discuss the Diaspora tax. At this meeting, Eritreans were urged to report any use of coercion or other illicit means to collect the tax to the police. We will continue to engage with the Diaspora on this issue”.

Lo and behold, the Eritrean diaspora did precisely this. They went into the embassy—at some risk, I might say. One of their members videoed and recorded the interaction. It was absolutely clear that they were told, “If you want to get the help you want from the embassy, you must pay your tax or you’ll get absolutely no help. You have to pay it and this is how you should do it”. All the evidence was given to them.

This was then taken to a police station in 2015. It was registered with the police. A police number was taken and absolutely nothing happened. In fact, the only thing that happened was that, at the end, a statement came back from Simon Fox of the Metropolitan Police saying that the collection of taxes on foreign nationals living abroad by various Governments around the world is not an uncommon practice. He quoted the United States as being the most obvious example. United Nations Resolution 2023 does not make this practice illegal; it calls for the Government of Eritrea not to use coercive or threatening methods to collect the tax. He said that only if a country concerned translates it into local law does it become locally enforceable.

The Eritrean diaspora, having collected the evidence and done what Baroness Warsi suggested they do, were told, “Sorry, this is a dead end”. I tell you, this produced a great deal of anger. They lost confidence in the police and the Government when they did what they had been asked to do in this House. Nothing happened. I am afraid that that was the end of that.

The Chair: I know that my colleague Lord Dholakia is going to ask you a little more about the diaspora tax that the Eritreans try to impose on people living in the United Kingdom. Before we get to that, Ms Coughtrie, do you want to add anything further on the question that Lord Sewell has just posed to your colleagues?

Susan Coughtrie: In terms of surveillance, the intention is that surveillance, in particular, is secret and you do not know about it. Some of the journalists with whom we have spoken and who have experienced it have often found out, in effect, after the fact or by accident. Tom Burgis, the journalist and author of Kleptopia, found out that he had been surveilled in London as a result of US filings for a legal case related to his book; that is how he found out he had been surveilled. Similarly, Catherine Belton, who wrote Putin’s People, discovered that she had been surveilled visiting one of her sources because the source was contacted and threatened by email.

A key issue is that, when those types of things happen, there is nowhere obvious to go and report them. Even in the instance of one journalist I know, who believed that she was being surveilled in the street—she went to a police station and explained that she was somebody who was working on corruption issues—there was very little that the local police station was able to offer her.

In another example, when the journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown was threatened for the second time with an Interpol red notice—I was actually with her on that occasion—there was no clear guidance or contact point. Who do you contact to find out whether another country, in this case Malaysia, is threatening you with a malicious Interpol notice? In the end, it was a civil society action writing a letter to Interpol to confirm that that was not going ahead. It had previously rejected Malaysia’s first attempt a few years earlier. It is a concern that none of this is being gathered anywhere in any central point. There are all these various types. As we have talked about, it is a spectrum. I am not sure that the police, although they clearly have a role, are the main focal point for collecting that information and analysing it.

The Chair: That is very helpful. We have had evidence on that question from other witnesses on previous occasions. If you have further thoughts about what can be done to address the point raised by Lord Sewell about how engagement with the police, or the authorities generally, can be more proactive, perhaps you can give us further information in due course.

Q40 Lord Dholakia: Martin Plaut, you mentioned the 2% diaspora tax earlier. What methods are being used, other than the ones you explained, to collect this tax? What happens when such a tax is not paid? Has the matter been taken up? You mentioned Baroness Warsi dealing with this particular matter but that was some years ago, not recently. Has this matter been taken up, or should the committee be pursuing with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office this matter of the collection of such taxes from people who may be Eritrean citizens but may also be British nationals, having stayed in this country for a considerably long time?

Martin Plaut: I know of no action that the Government are taking on the 2% tax. The 2% tax, I would add, is only one of the taxes used by the Eritrean Government. At times of war, they extract other taxes to pay for the army and military. You may be aware that there is national conscription in Eritrea, which is indefinite in duration. Some people have been in the military for over 20 years. They are in effect unpaid. They get a tiny amount of money, and they can be dispatched to any place in the country in that period.

There are two ways in which they extract it. The first is that, if somebody requires any assistance from the embassy, whether it is a birth certificate or they want to sell their grandmother’s house or something like that, they have to go to the embassy. The embassy’s first question is, “Have you paid your tax?”—either the 2% tax or any other taxes. By that, they do not just mean the 2% tax on this year; they mean from the date you arrived in the country. If you arrive and get a grant as a refugee, or if you get a student loan then you get your first job, they will want complete paperwork right from that moment. They say that that 2% must be on the entire sum. Sometimes that money is paid in the embassy; sometimes they arrange other means of transferring the money directly to Eritrea, or else to the Gulf.

One oddity about Eritrea is that it has no formal system of administration, so there is no Budget. You do not have the Budget as you had an event here today. There is no Budget. The money is kept mostly offshore in business accounts in the Gulf, in places such as Switzerland, and frequently by individuals. For example, you could be instructed, say, to send a sum of money to an Italian businessman who is of Eritrean origin, who will hold the money in an account. If the Government require armaments, say, that money will be made available. It is a very informal system that operates. It is almost as if the Government are behaving like a guerrilla movement, which they once were. That is how it happens.

That is only one element. I have talked about what happens when you go to the embassy, but there is a lot of pressure on you as a member of a community. Nobody knows how many Eritreans there are; there has never been a census in living memory. There are something like 4 million or 5 million Eritreans. A lot of them are abroad. We do not know how many, but it is a small community and people in the diaspora, as I am sure people are aware, like to come together because it is one of the means of having a social relationship.

You will be ostracised if the Government begin to put out the idea that you are not patriotic. If you do not pay your taxes, you are seen as unpatriotic. They will use systems of spreading rumours that are officially sanctioned to undermine your position in the community, and you will become increasingly isolated. There are examples of people being threatened physically, but those are a rarity because they frequently are not required.

Lord Dholakia: You mentioned earlier the festivals organised by the Eritrean embassy. Are they still continuing in this country? What pressure is being brought on the community’s people to attend such festivals?

Martin Plaut: Yes, there are festivals. They have been going on for years and years, and there are many of them in all sorts of places. I know, because I have spoken to it, that the Metropolitan Police certainly monitors them because it wants to be sure that there are no future clashes. It has intervened to prevent them, but they are continuing. They go on all the time because, as I said, they produce something like an estimated one-third of all of the Government’s revenue, so they cannot give them up.

Q41 Alex Sobel: On Eritrea’s independence day, there is a commemoration in Leeds and, I know, all around the country. We have not had any violence in Leeds but I know that there is violence in London, and there was some violence last week—although not linked to independence day—in Sheffield. Is this an issue around the country? Is this day, 24 May, which is independence day, a particular flashpoint?

Martin Plaut: It is one of the flashpoints, absolutely. You are quite right that it is all around the country. The problem is that these are not just cultural events. They used to import government Ministers from Eritrea, or otherwise officials, and then singers. There are examples of them using the most blood-curdling military songs. They have children marching up and down in uniform with pretend guns. No wonder people who have risked their lives to flee their country, to cross the Sahara, to cross the Mediterranean and to get to Britain feel as though they are back at home, so to speak, and that the kind of repression they are facing there is what they are facing in Britain. They find that very uncomfortable.

The Chair: That is vivid and graphic. Thank you.

Q42 Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon: All three of you have spoken so much about what happened under the previous Government. How is the current Government’s policy addressing transnational repression in the UK? How can the Government remove some of what is happening to Eritreans?

Susan Coughtrie: Tackling transnational repression in the UK has been a policy blind spot for a number of years. There have definitely been attempts to address certain parts of the issue. As has already been mentioned, the serious threat to life-type level, where there are interventions by the authorities to try to protect those who are under imminent threat, is one thing. The clear gap in this is that there is no central point or body that understands this issue in a 360 way, documents what is happening, analyses it and tries to provide both support to those who are subject to it and advice and analysis to relevant Government departments or UK bodies, in order for them to be better able and better equipped to address the problem.

The Foreign Policy Centre is part of a working group on this issue. We submitted evidence to the committee with a suggested four-part approach, which is to monitor, respond, support and prevent. There are certain actions that we would recommend under each of those points that could be done, but they basically cover what I have already said. First, it is about making sure that that information is actually being received by the Government. With anything, if you are trying to solve a problem, you really need to understand it to begin with. For me, that is critical.

With regards to SLAPPs specifically, which I think we will come on to in a moment, one element that I see as a possible point of comparison is that the National Committee for the Safety of Journalists added SLAPPs to its national action plan about 18 months ago. We would really like to see transnational oppression be added to that action plan as well. The national action plan is overseen by the National Committee for the Safety of Journalists, which also involves various bodies, including the police. That is one very clear mechanism by which those who are involved have a better understanding of the problem and can start looking at measures to monitor cases and think about solutions.

James Lynch: I totally agree with everything Susan said. It is quite difficult to know how effective this Government are or the last one were in terms of their policy, because I do not think I have ever seen a very clear policy on this issue. We see occasional statements, but they tend to be very linked to one country or community. The sense of a joined‑up strategy that links the different agencies and geographies together does not seem to be there. If it is there, it has never been made public. That results in some of these issues falling through the cracks and hence that need for the 360 approach that Susan referred to.

One case I would give as a quick example is a UK-based person who was getting a threatening phone call from a known Government-linked individual in Egypt, in the Sinai. The advice that we were given was to contact the police. This was stated on paper. It felt to me that there was very little chance of the police taking any action with regard to an individual calling from the Sinai, but the threat that they were getting on the phone was very serious. It feels like, with the reliance on and instinctively going to the National Security Act and the criminal law enforcement angle here, we miss the range of forms of repression and the range of tools that the Government have at their fingertips.

I failed to reply to Sir Desmond’s question earlier about surveillance. If we look at the Government response on surveillance, the Gulf states are prolific users of hacking technology against people in the UK. They work very closely with Israeli tech companies; this is linked to the Abraham accords. They are developing their own capacities as well.

There have been a number of very high-profile cases that have gone to court, but they have been civil cases. This has been left to people needing to bring cases themselves against their Governments and try to win all the arguments about sovereign immunity. I have seen one of the lawyers for some of these people who have been winning cases—they are from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Tunisia—against their Governments. One thing the lawyer has said is: “Why is it left to people to bring the cases themselves? Why is it left to civil society, whether it be Amnesty International or Citizen Lab, to identify that people have this stuff on their phones and have been targeted? Where is the state in all this?” I do not see it as particularly present in this discussion.

In fact, I remember once going to the Foreign Office and telling someone: “I got this weird email. I clicked on it and it was a fake NGO trying to hack my computer”. He said, “You should consider suing someone”. I thought, “Surely your department should be able to do more than that”, but that is an anecdote.

Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon: What recommendation can you put to us for the Government to take in support of the diaspora that is here now? What levy would you suggest?

James Lynch: It goes to this point of having a centralised reporting and contact point that can co-ordinate between victims, the diaspora communities suffering these kinds of abuses and the different agencies and generate a more effective government response. It could also monitor and track the kinds of allegations and reports, so that even the low-level stuff can be captured, even if there may not be a specific action, so that trends can be monitored and, where necessary, resources can be gathered in the right areas. Public reporting of that is absolutely fundamental. At the moment, we have no idea of the scale of the issue.

Q43 Peter Swallow: Mr Lynch, earlier you spoke about the effects of repression of friends and family members overseas when activists are based here in the UK. How effectively does the FCDO respond to this when informed about such actions taken against family members and friends?

James Lynch: I would pick out one specific case to examine that, which is a case from Bahrain of the family of Sayed Alwadaei. He is the director of advocacy at the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy. In 2018, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention released an opinion which said that Sayed’s family members had been deprived of their liberty, interrogated and prosecuted for their family ties with him, and that these were acts of reprisal.

It was pretty clear that that was what was going on. It was three relatives of his and, in fact, those are not the only cases. He has had multiple different incidents over years. Often, it is very closely linked to coming to this building. Sayed will come here, speak to a room like this and, in the coming days, his family in Bahrain, or his wife’s family, face consequences. In that case, what did the Foreign Office tell Parliament when parliamentarians put that case to it? It said repeatedly that it had received categorical assurances from the Bahraini authorities that the cases were not reprisals, without any kind of query or challenge on that.

That may be a good example. At one level, we can all understand that it is difficult. These are other countries’ legal systems, so it is not straightforward for the Foreign Office to directly intervene. It has to think carefully about how it is going to do that to influence and support somebody who is here. They are not under its jurisdiction. But you see examples such as this, where, by taking the assurances of the repressing state and repeating them uncritically, you undermine the victims in both countries and act to insulate the Bahraini state against criticism and scrutiny. That is really disturbing.

Peter Swallow: Is there evidence of the response differing based on our diplomatic relations with the accused country?

James Lynch: It is hard to imagine that that would happen if somebody’s relatives were arrested in Iran, for example, based on activism they have done here. It would be interesting to do some sort of comparative research on that.

Q44 Alex Sobel: Ms Coughtrie, although the term “transnational repression” is fairly new, the practice has been going on for a very long time. Some countries’ Governments have acted on it more than others. What could the UK Government learn from other countries’ legislative and policy responses, for instance the police forces or security services in other countries?

Susan Coughtrie: I would hasten to add that this is not really my area to speak to, but it is important to learn from best practice from other countries. We know that the US, for some time, was leading the way. Whether that will still be the case is to be seen. One thing it did was recognise that this was a problem and name it. It also set up mechanisms by which it was possible to report cases of transnational repression. The FBI had a hotline on which to do so. It was looking at a range of measures that could support people in order to help them. In terms of an assessment of their effectiveness, I think there will be others who would be better able to answer the question.

Martin Plaut: The evidence is that the Netherlands has gone quite a long way. It established—I am particularly talking here about Eritrea—a mechanism and encouraged people to report to a particular branch of government. The Norwegians are looking at how to do this. The Canadians expelled the ambassador because of what was gathered. In America, similar action has been taken because of the extraction of taxes.

There is one other thing that one has to remember. Transnational repression is not only restricted to Governments. I would bring one example to mind, which is what happened in the Sinai and continues to happen in places such as Libya. People are given phones and told to call their relatives to get the money they require in order to cross a border, pay a ransom, get across the Mediterranean or something like this. There are documented examples of burning plastic being dripped on the backs of some of these people while they were on the phone to their relatives. There are documented examples of women being raped while they are speaking to their relatives. One can only imagine the impact that this has on those at the other end. This is not a Government doing it. These are traffickers, but it is still a form of transnational repression.

To answer Baroness Lawrence’s question, I know of no change in policy from the current Government and I would endorse what the others have said: there is no systematic approach. That leaves the Metropolitan Police, in a sense, trying to hold the fort. They are the people who, in the end, have to try to do something, but it is a very weak something.

Alex Sobel: Could I press you on the point you made about the US and the 2% tax? What action has it taken?

Martin Plaut: It expelled someone; it was not the ambassador. I think it was a consul. I think that it was in California. I would have to look up the specifics.

The Chair: Could you get us the details about that, please, Mr Plaut? If you could inform the committee, that would be very helpful for our report.

James Lynch: I will comment briefly, because this is slightly beyond my expertise. In our working group submission, we highlighted two things that you can see. You have countries that provide some information about what threats are occurring in their countries—Sweden and Finland do that in annual reports on their websites. Then you have countries that offer some kind of contact point that is very explicitly linked to TNR, even if those contact points might deal with other issues as well, such as the US and France. These are really quite straightforward and very cheap steps that could be taken and would move us a long way, even as a first step.

The Chair: It would be helpful to the committee if you were able to provide us with those examples.

James Lynch: In Sweden, the security service does an annual report and reports on cases brought under the charge of refugee espionage, which is a charge it has in the law. That is about intelligence activities directed against opposition figures, regime critics and other minority groups. In Finland, the Finnish Security and Intelligence Service provides public information on its website regarding the actions of authoritarian regimes to spy on citizens that have emigrated to Finland and engage in activities that those regimes consider a threat. These are pretty clear examples of good practice.

Q45 Afzal Khan: How is the UK’s response to transnational repression affected by its diplomatic relationships with the perpetrator states? Has there been a consistent approach to instances of transnational repression from different perpetrator states?

James Lynch: This question is quite important for the countries that I tend to focus on. It is maybe worth placing this in the context of the UK’s wider approach on human rights internationally, which is that there is a clear difference in how the UK responds to human rights violations committed by states it supports and works closely with, whether that is Saudi Arabia, Israel or Bahrain, compared to those with which it does not and where it has a more adversarial relationship. It is far less likely to speak out about violations and to support, for example, accountability mechanisms being used, such as the ICC or sanctions.

How does that play out with transnational repression? I do not know of any statements about the use of transnational repression by any Arab states where the UK has close relationships. Fortunately, in these cases we are not looking at the scale and severity of violent physical attacks that you might be looking at with, say, Iran. However, when you look at the overall package of what is happening, the practices used by the Arab states and the impact it has on people, it is pretty serious. That is a real, serious gap.

This goes beyond just not holding these countries to account publicly. We talked about the example of Sayed, where the assurances given by the Bahraini state were repeated uncritically. There is a risk here because Gulf state Governments in particular have a lot of influence over the UK Government. They have privileged channels of communication with our leaders. For example, it has been reported that, in 2024, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, in a conversation with the former Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, attempted to pressure the UK into challenging and pushing back on a case brought by a Saudi dissident around hacking. The Saudi system was telling the UK system: “What you do in this case has implications for our economic and investment relationship”. That is a vulnerability that needs to be looked at very seriously. It points to the need for this consistent, straightforward approach on these cases.

The other thing to highlight is that we have seen some indications that, in terms of citizenship applications here, people who are subject to transnational repression are treated differently when they are from countries with which we are closely linked. Sayed Alwadaei’s citizenship application was very significantly delayed. He managed to obtain documents that showed that the Foreign Office was holding it up on political grounds, despite the fact that the Home Office was saying, “This application is absolutely fine. There is no reason to block it”.

I know of other cases of people whose citizenship applications are being delayed very significantly. What may be happening is that the UK Government are so worried about the offence they may cause Gulf state partners by offering citizenship to these people who are a thorn in their side that there is potentially some kind of clogging up of our system. This creates a perception of mistrust, which really needs addressing.

Martin Plaut: The example of Rwanda is a good one. You will be aware of the links, from not only the past Government but the Conservative Party, with the Government of Rwanda, which go back to Project Umubano, which they developed between 2007 and 2009, which included cricket teams. I know for a fact that people such as Andrew Mitchell were briefed on the repressive nature of the Rwandan Government more than once and that he was not interested in hearing it. I am afraid that that is the reality. You then have the development of the refugee programme, which of course linked Britain to the Rwandan Government directly, but this does not apply at the moment. In those circumstances, you can imagine that the relationship was, shall we say, compromised.

Lord Sewell of Sanderstead: This is just a devil’s advocate question. For countries that are fully fledged democracies such as Trinidad, it is going to be hard because they now have to have visas to get to Britain. The rationale behind that was simply that Trinidadians were coming to the country and claiming asylum on bogus grounds, and there were too many of them. From Jamaica, which I know more closely, there are people coming in and saying that within that country they have suffered because they are gay and, again, it is about human rights.

These could be argued to be transnational repressions and the Governments in those countries would argue that they are fully fledged democracies. Is there a case that perhaps some people are gaming the system just to get asylum and that really there is not a case of big transnational repression, particularly in those two countries? I ask the question because you have pinpointed countries such as Eritrea and Bahrain, which are not democracies, but what about those that are?

Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: That is not transnational repression. Yes, there might be people who game the system in order to get asylum or whatever, but transnational repression is where you are taking your repressive practices and practising them over there. That is not what you are describing where somebody comes from Trinidad and applies for asylum, maintaining that, as a gay person, they are being persecuted and so on. That is about gaming the asylum system, but it is not about transnational repression.

The Chair: We are going wide of the questions on the order paper today, but I am very happy for you to return to that, and perhaps outside the committee to have conversations with our witnesses around it, if we may, but we ought to cover the ground that we have to address today. I call on Lord Murray to ask the next question, which takes us on to the issue of SLAPPs.

Q46 Lord Murray of Blidworth: Turning to the question of strategic litigation against public participation, Ms Coughtrie, I wonder whether I could start by asking you whether you found in your work that SLAPPs are being used as a transnational repression tactic. I have in mind particularly the comment from Mr Plaut that transnational repression is not restricted to Governments. It seems to me that SLAPPs are a classic example, because I cannot think of a single SLAPP that has been brought by a Government. They are brought by either individual people or possibly proxies acting on a Government’s behalf. Perhaps you could give us your views on that.

Susan Coughtrie: I will start by saying that you would not classify all SLAPP cases as transnational repression, but you have hit the nail on the head there with regards to how actors closely aligned with the state can be utilised in order to carry out forms of transnational repression through legal harassment. Probably one of the most famous cases in the UK of SLAPPs, and one of the first prominent cases, was the legal cases taken against Catherine Belton, the journalist and author who wrote the book Putin’s People. She was pursued originally by five oligarchs, including Roman Abramovich, but also Rosneft, which is the Russian state gas company, so there was a very direct link there.

Although many of the claimants were trying to distance themselves from their relationship with the Russian Government, for many of them it is well documented, including within Catherine’s book. We can see that now, particularly in light of Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine, after which all those people and entities have been sanctioned for their connection and their political connections to the Russian state.

Lord Murray of Blidworth: How easy is it to identify when a SLAPP has a link with a foreign state, in your view?

Susan Coughtrie: For every case, you have to look at the merits and the context of the case itself. My research is focused on cases related to financial crime and corruption in countries where it is pretty clear that the state, the members of the state and those connected—the political and business elites—have extracted the wealth from their own people. Then they have exported that wealth abroad, including to the UK, using our financial and legal jurisdictions. These are countries that crack down heavily on independent media and civil society. Russia is a very clear example of that. They do that to prevent reporting about their wrongdoing.

What do they do when people move abroad or go into exile, or they are international journalists working elsewhere and reporting on them? Their options are more limited, perhaps directly, and we have seen that SLAPPs are one of the tools that they have utilised. There are some examples I would point to.

Another high-profile case linked with Russia is Yevgeny Prigozhin, who sued the journalist Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, a few years ago. That case ended up being discontinued when Prigozhin’s lawyers withdrew their representation after the full-scale invasion into Ukraine. Although Prigozhin was already a sanctioned individual by the UK, the EU and the US, he was still able to engage legal representation here through his lawyers applying for a special licence to the UK Treasury. That policy has since changed and now sanctioned individuals are not able to automatically get licences to take these kinds of civil cases, which is a positive development. As I mentioned, other figures, such as Abramovich, have now been sanctioned since those original cases.

Another example would be Azerbaijan. Paul Radu, the co-founder of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, was sued despite being Romanian and despite the OCCRP being registered in the US. He was sued by a sitting Azerbaijani MP here in the UK in connection to the reporting that OCCRP had done on the Azerbaijani laundromat, which was a money laundering scheme that saw $2.9 billion extracted out of Azerbaijan through four UK shell companies.

Paul was pursued through the UK courts for almost three years before the case was settled on the eve of the trial. It took Paul and his colleagues a lot of money, time and effort. It was about £500,000 they had to raise to defend the case to that point. They continued investigating that MP and his family’s links, and that information was disclosed prior to trial. The decision was taken by the claimant to withdraw the case.

Lord Murray of Blidworth: You have given us a number of examples of journalists being the subject of the transnational repression tactic of applying a SLAPP. Can you think of examples in other areas? I have in mind that there is one former parliamentarian who I think was the subject of a SLAPP. What was the basis for that? Was that an instance of transnational repression, in your view?

Susan Coughtrie: My area of research is on journalists, so the examples that I focus on are therefore journalists. We can see whether there is a foreign actor or affiliated proxy who has an interest in utilising, in this case, the UK courts to shut down reporting in the public interest. If the legal threats are successful, that reporting may never come out and you may never hear anything about it, so it creates a vacuum of information. That is highly concerning.

The reason why SLAPPs have been successful in this country in particular is because of the incredible amount of money, time and resources it takes to defend them, even at an early stage, before you get to court. Just to get to an early hearing, it is £25,000 to £50,000. Not everybody is in a position to defend themselves. Unfortunately, that is part of the reason why they have been successful and people are afraid to speak out in case they might invite more.

In terms of the case that you are, I think, referring to, it is complicated. We also have a lot of international figures who are affiliated with a lot of different countries through their work, so I will not speak to that. But you can see a similar effort to shut down reporting in the public interest. There was a range of issues. It was not just the legal cases; it was also harassment and surveillance. Again, that is something I mentioned that we see repeatedly in these cases, and, importantly, using UK-based professionals.

That area has been really overlooked and there is a lack of regulation. There is a certain amount of regulation for lawyers, but for PR companies and private investigators there is not that professional regulation and there is a lack of transparency on who they are working for. I know that there has been the foreign influence registration scheme passed in legislation but it is yet to be implemented. It is important to understand who our professional industries are working for when they take this type of work.

The Chair: This is your specialist subject and we are very grateful to you for the expertise that you are sharing with us. Our other two panellists, when we get to the last question, where you will be asked if there are any recommendations you have for us, perhaps you could link any comments you have about SLAPPs to that. I am very keen that we should go to Baroness Kennedy, who wants to pursue this issue and perhaps develop further what you have just said, Ms Coughtrie, about regulation that is there but has not been implemented. That would, presumably, be one of your recommendations as well.

Q47 Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: Ms Coughtrie, you and I know each other very well and have worked together around the issue of SLAPPs. You have mentioned a number of the cases of journalists being subjected to the fear and terror of the impact that a successful defamation or libel case could have on their lives because of cost, et cetera.

You particularly mentioned the one involving Eliot Higgins from Bellingcat. To remind people around the table, we have recently had the conviction of people who are here in this country, clearly paid for by the Russian regime, to plot and plan the death of another leading member of Bellingcat—which is an investigative bureau that works on exposing criminality by states, but particularly by Russia—and that was in relation to Navalny. We have just had this conviction, which showed the long arm of Russia as a state doing these things.

I want to ask you about the way in which Eliot Higgins was litigated against by Prigozhin before he had his strange and unexpected death in an aeroplane crash, which has lots of question marks associated with it, after he had had his own little revolution against President Putin. Prigozhin was suing, although he was subject to constraint and listed as being an enemy of this nation because of his closeness to Putin. He was objecting to the fact that evidence was being included in the work of Bellingcat suggesting that Prigozhin’s men, the Wagner Group, had murdered a team of journalists in Africa who were involved in trying to access gold and other rich minerals in the Central African Republic.

What kind of legislation could be brought into being to deal with that? Did you have any success in persuading the previous Government? There was talk about creating SLAPP legislation then. Are this Government are at all interested in progressing that work on SLAPP legislation?

Susan Coughtrie: Under the previous Government, there were some anti‑SLAPP provisions brought into law through the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, which was adopted about 18 months ago. Those provisions have yet to be implemented, but they are expected to be implemented in the coming months. Nevertheless, those provisions are extremely limited, not least because they must relate to an issue of economic crime. We see many cases, even when we think that it might be linked to economic crime and corruption, where that is not the heart of the claim.

In Prigozhin’s case, it was very specifically about whether he was the head of the Wagner Group. As you have mentioned, he had already been subject to sanctions that linked him to the Wagner Group in several jurisdictions. Nevertheless, the UK law firm Discreet Law felt that it could take his case. Unfortunately, that ran until at least the early hearing stage, when it collapsed because the representation was withdrawn by the law firm. The case was thrown out because Prigozhin was not complying with the court. It still left Eliot Higgins £70,000 out of pocket. As I mentioned, that was after the UK Government granted Prigozhin’s lawyers sanction to take the case.

I would argue that that is an abuse of our system. We officially know that he was the head of Wagner because he announced it himself about six months later. Nevertheless, there was very strong indication that he was already affiliated. Moreover, the case that he took against Eliot Higgins was as an individual for tweets retweeting other media outlets, including Bellingcat, but also Der Spiegel and CNN. Discreet Law did not pursue, on Prigozhin’s behalf, any legal cases against those outlets, so, from our point of view, it looked particularly targeted at Eliot Higgins personally, to add that level of intimidation and harassment. As I mentioned, the case ran for only six months into early stages and yet he was still £70,000 out of pocket.

There was really positive progress at the beginning of last year, when a Private Member’s Bill was brought forward by Wayne David, now retired but at the time a Labour MP, which was a universal anti-SLAPP Bill that would have covered any topic in the public interest and was supported by the then Conservative Government. We have seen consistently, since this issue has been on the political agenda in the UK over the last four years, that there is cross-party support. When people understand and hear about this problem, they realise the impact it is having and the need to address it.

What was quite critical about that progress—it had reached Committee stage in the Commons—was that it looked at the framework by which a SLAPP case would be assessed at an early stage. The idea is that the law would help create an early dismissal mechanism and an assessment of whether the case was in the public interest and demonstrated the criteria of a SLAPP, so it could be dismissed early. It would reduce the amount of potential for these cases to move forward, but also the potential for people to bring them.

It already assessed that the anti-SLAPP provisions in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act were not sufficient. They relied too heavily on subjective tests rather than objective tests. I will not go into the nitty‑gritty of that, unless you would like me to. Ultimately, it means that we are now into this new Government with provisions that we know will not be effective. They are limited to economic crime, so they are very unlikely to be effective. We might as well just be saying that we have not done anything really from a practical point of view, although we recognise that it is great that SLAPPs have been acknowledged and are in law.

We would really like to see this Government bring forward a universal and effective anti-SLAPP law. It is not without possibility; they already exist in other countries. The UK is part of the Council of Europe, which produced guidance and a recommendation on this last year. The EU also produced a directive, so European countries are currently obliged to transfer anti‑SLAPP legislation into their domestic laws. The UK is likely to fall far short and far behind others that are addressing this issue.

Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: You are basically recommending that we should be looking at the possibility of tougher legislation. It may be that this committee will at some stage make that an inquiry that we conduct. I wanted to ask you to confirm, finally, that there seems to be a strategy that is not to go after the big news corporations and television news companies but to go after individual journalists. The effect of that is specifically the chilling effect. It is basically to make investigative journalists, even if they are working with a bigger outfit, worried about the ways in which they can be vulnerable to this kind of attack, which could destroy them economically.

Susan Coughtrie: Yes, absolutely. We see that media outlets also receive legal threats, often routinely, but they are usually equipped with in-house media lawyers. That is not always a given for independent journalists or small investigative outlets, which are often specialising in this type of anti‑corruption investigations and things like that. It is an expensive type of journalism and it is incredibly important for society to know about.

As we have already discussed, the huge amounts of money that are involved mean that there is a huge imbalance of arms, effectively. Most people looking at this on first glance will think, “There is a due legal process and that is fine”, but you are not going into that due legal process on an equal footing. That is partly why it is so successful.

I have one very quick point on why the law is really important, coming back to the Prigozhin case. The Solicitors Regulation Authority recently closed a complaint by Eliot Higgins against the law firm Discreet Law. One point it made was about the limitations of regulation without a legal framework. To its credit, the SRA has done quite a bit of work in terms of recognising the problem. It produced a warning notice on SLAPPs about two years ago, which it has since updated. As of last year, we know that it opened at least 70 investigations into various complaints.

However, there are issues with the fact that it does not have a legal framework to reference. We saw that with the first Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal case that came up through the SLAPP complaint system, which was not a case of transnational repression, where the judgment found that there was misconduct but decided to say it was not a SLAPP case without explaining why or what its understanding of a SLAPP case is. While the Government have referred to the regulatory stuff and the anti‑SLAPP provisions in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, in order to cut through all of this we need one universal anti‑SLAPP law that sets the picture that everything else can stem from.

Q48 The Chair: Time is against us, I am afraid. The clock has beaten us, but you have answered what would have been my last question to you, Ms Coughtrie, anyway, about what your recommendations to the Government would be if you could put yourself in our place as we come to write our report and make recommendations. I turn to the other two panellists and ask them very succinctly: if you had a couple of points to summarise all the things that you have been saying in your magnificent evidence to us today, what would be your priorities in the things that you would ask us to recommend to the Government?

Martin Plaut: There are some points, but I wonder whether I can very briefly make a point that, in a sense, goes to Lord Sewell’s point about democracies. We should not forget that this can be a two-way street. Let us not forget that Bell Pottinger, which is a PR firm in this country, attempted to export civil war to South Africa. It did this by attacking what it called white monopoly capitalism and promoting the slogan, “Land or death”. When this was revealed, Bell Pottinger finally collapsed. It can work in both directions. We have to bear that in mind when we are addressing this question.

The other thing is how widespread this can be. I do not know how many of you have seen “Skandal! Bringing Down Wirecard” on Netflix, which is an extraordinary film, but it highlights the role of Jan Marsalek, who has been highlighted more recently—he was involved in Wirecard—as being at the heart of the Bulgarian spies who were revealed to be operating in Britain recently. There, he mobilised in Austria threats of mass migration across the Mediterranean to try to change a Government. This is what you are facing now: massive and complex situations that cross jurisdictions.

I would recommend two things. First, an encouragement should be given to diasporic communities that they have a means of representing their concerns to the Government and a clear pathway to do it. The second is in the opposite direction—an annual report to Parliament that lays out what is happening to the best of the knowledge of whichever agency is asked to do it. If those two things were done, it would move a long way in the right direction.

The Chair: One of your points was echoing something that Mr Lynch said to us about experience from overseas in Finland and elsewhere.

James Lynch: This is just a quick final thought. There are these two combined problems that come up all the time with all the different countries. There is a lack of holistic assessment of this issue, of the scope and scale of transnational repression and any public reporting about it, apart from occasional country-specific statements. That combines with the lack of any mechanism beyond, as Martin said, the Metropolitan Police, which is landed with everything, or any mechanism for people to report on and engage with on this topic.

You have effects for the victims and for the Government. For the victims, it leaves them in the dark and with no agency. Somebody said to me, “I have no way to take informed decisions about my safety, who I can see, what I can post and whether the UK will protect me”, because they do not have that information about the policy of the Government or the Government’s assessment. They do not have a contact point to talk to about the potential emerging risk.

It gives them no validation. One thing we have not talked about is this constant sense people have of being gaslit when they try to explain their experience and people look at them as if they are mad. We should not forget that element of this as well. That is the victims’ perspective of where we are now.

For the Government, we are missing this big opportunity to properly monitor and analyse the trends and then develop a coherent strategy to tackle it. For the offending states, the current situation and the fact that there is not even, as Martin says, an annual report that says what the perpetrating states seem to be means that there is no deterrent effect. For a lot of the countries I am talking about, such as Arab states and Gulf states, people have said to me, “Listen, if the UK Government were to publish that they are getting allegations or reports about this in a formal way, that is some form of deterrent”. That is a seriously bad outcome. To deter this kind of behaviour, just speaking about it would be a big step forward.

The Chair: I hope that what you have been saying to us today is a step forward in that direction. Mr Lynch, Mr Plaut and Ms Coughtrie, thank you so much for sharing your expertise, wisdom and insights. We will go away and reflect on the examples that you have given us today. We have had a lot of evidence to the inquiry. We will work hard in trying to bring forward our report and recommendations. For now, let me thank you for joining us.