Rights groups warn of Pakistan’s escalating transnational repression

Pakistan’s turn to transnational repression has intensified under Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir because of the absolute power he has amassed. In the last three years, since Munir became army chief, the state’s coercive arm has extended well beyond Pakistan’s borders, targeting journalists, activists, and increasingly, political opponents in the diaspora.

What once seemed unthinkable, Pakistani authorities reaching into different countries to intimidate citizens, has now become routine. The message is clear: criticism of the army, whether from Karachi or New York, will not be tolerated, and retribution can follow anywhere.

The most visible casualties of this strategy remain journalists, whose cases illustrate the scope of Pakistan’s reach. In October 2022, senior television anchor Arshad Sharif, who had fled sedition cases and threats from the military, was gunned down in Kenya.  The Kenyan courts later ruled his killing unlawful, yet justice remains elusive, and suspicions of the Pakistani military’s involvement persist. In March 2025, investigative reporter Ahmad Noorani published a report exposing Munir’s expanding influence; within days, his brothers in Islamabad were abducted, and a colleague in Balochistan disappeared. Soon after, his YouTube channel was blocked in Pakistan as part of a cybercrime investigation.  These cases were condemned internationally as examples of extraterritorial repression. They represent the bluntest signal that even the dissent abroad is no safer than dissent inside Pakistan. 

However, what began with journalists also spread aggressively to political workers, particularly those affiliated with Imran Khan and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). Since Khan’s ouster in 2022, the military establishment has waged a systematic campaign to dismantle PTI’s organizational power. Inside Pakistan, thousands of workers have been jailed, killed, party leaders coerced into abandoning Khan, and even women supporters tortured in custody. That repression has spilled across borders. In 2025, PTI demonstrations outside Pakistani embassies in London, Toronto, and Washington were met not only with local police pressure but with clear surveillance by embassy staff and private actors linked to Pakistani intelligence. Protesters reported receiving threatening phone calls, and their families in Pakistan were questioned by security agencies.

In the United Kingdom, PTI supporters staging rallies outside Pakistan’s High Commission in London have been photographed and profiled, with their images circulated on social media accounts linked to pro-military networks. In Canada, activists organizing town halls reported that relatives back home were suddenly visited by intelligence officials, warning them to “control” their family members abroad. In the United States, PTI rallies near Capitol Hill in mid-2025 drew sharp criticism from Pakistani officials, and reports surfaced that embassy staff compiled lists of participants. This form of intimidation is not only coercive but calculated: it aims to fracture the confidence of a diaspora that has become a powerful voice amplifying Khan’s message internationally.

Munir himself has made this strategy explicit. On trips to Western capitals in 2024 and 2025, he gave speeches to diaspora gatherings and policy forums in which he openly derided Imran Khan and painted PTI supporters abroad as enemies of the state. In London, his remarks portraying PTI workers as “agents of chaos” drew headlines, while in Washington, D.C., he went further, accusing them of spreading “foreign-funded propaganda” against Pakistan. Such statements, delivered on Western soil, are more than rhetoric—they serve as marching orders for repression. By branding political opponents as existential threats, Munir legitimizes state surveillance and legal harassment of Pakistani citizens living abroad. 

The diaspora harassment works hand in hand with Pakistan’s misuse of law. In early 2025, Pakistani courts accepted petitions demanding action against PTI’s overseas social media cells, accusing them of “inciting mutiny” through criticism of the army. These absurd complaints are not meant to result in trials—they are meant to signal that exiles remain under the law’s shadow, that they cannot travel home without fear of arrest, and that their voices will be criminalized at the source. As rights groups like Human Rights Watch have noted, these charges conflate peaceful political activity with terrorism, erasing any line between dissent and crime.  This has created an atmosphere of fear and self-censorship within the diaspora. Families are the most common tool of coercion. In Germany, Sindhi and Baloch activists have reported the same pattern: relatives back home summoned, threatened, and harassed to force silence abroad. 

Human rights organizations have increasingly flagged this Pakistani state-backed repression. The Committee to Protect Journalists called the 2025 cases against exiled reporters “a severe escalation in Pakistan’s crackdown.” The CIVICUS Monitor labeled Pakistan a “repressed” state, noting its systematic targeting of activists and party workers, both domestic and diaspora.  Amnesty International criticized the government for criminalizing PTI protests and diaspora activism, warning that these moves violate Pakistan’s obligations under international human rights treaties. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, in its own annual report, admitted that the space for dissent has not only shrunk at home but has been deliberately constricted abroad.

The cost of this repression is more than individual suffering. By turning embassies into instruments of surveillance and intimidation, Pakistan risks alienating host governments already uneasy with Islamabad’s human rights record. A U.S. congressional panel in July 2025 heard testimony on Pakistan’s repression of PTI supporters and journalists in exile, warning of sanctions if the practice continues.  British MPs have raised questions in Parliament about the intimidation of protesters outside the High Commission in London. These signals suggest that Pakistan’s military-led government may soon face international consequences for what has become an unstoppable campaign of global censorship.

Under Munir, Pakistan has normalized a policy of exporting fear: journalists killed or silenced, party workers harassed in foreign capitals, families punished at home, and generals delivering threats abroad with impunity. What began as censorship of domestic reporters has matured into a system of transnational repression targeting entire political movements. PTI supporters, once seen as untouchable in the West, now find themselves tracked, threatened, and criminalized. Pakistan has slid into a state where dissent is impossible both inside and outside its borders. The future for Pakistan is in shambles, where the military’s shadow follows citizens everywhere and the right to speak is extinguished at home and abroad alike.