Restricting Freedom of Movement Is a Favorite Tool for Repressive Regimes

Needing permission to travel hands a dangerous tool to authoritarians.

When you don't like the rules—or rulers—where you live, and trying to change things isn't worth the time, effort, or danger, one good response is to get the hell out. Find someplace that's more to your taste by voting for something different with your feet. But what if the local powers-that-be don't want dissidents to go and limit paths to exit? A new report says that's exactly what many governments around the world are doing with restrictions on freedom of movement used as tools of political repression.

55 Governments Punish Critics by Restricting Movement

"The governments of at least 55 countries around the world, including India, Nicaragua, and Saudi Arabia, restrict freedom of movement to punish, coerce, or control people whom they view as political threats or opponents," Freedom House announced last week about a report documenting such controls. "The four main tactics for restricting mobility are revoking citizenship, controlling access to key documents, denying consular services, and imposing travel bans."

That report, No Way In or Out: Authoritarian Controls on the Freedom of Movement, by Amy Slipowitz, Jessica White, and Yana Gorokhovskaia, points out that travel restrictions often fly below the radar since they can be informally imposed and passed off as bureaucratic inefficiency that just happened to target opponents of the regime. They can also be imposed on those who flee overseas, leaving them stranded, separated from families, and stateless in their places of refuge.

Stripped of Passports

"They can apply to individual dissidents, like the six UK-based Hong Kong prodemocracy activists living in exile who recently had their passports canceled, as well as to groups, like Eritreans abroad who must sign a 'regret and repentance' form admitting to leaving the country illegally or failing to fulfill their national service in order to receive consular services," write the authors.

In a statement in June revoking their passports and banning Hong Kong residents from providing them with funds, authorities in Chinese-run Hong Kong insisted the six dissidents "continue to blatantly engage in activities that endanger national security" and charged them with making "scaremongering remarks to smear and slander the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region."

Freedom House puts such mobility restrictions in the context of an 18-year decline in global freedom documented in its separate Freedom in the World report, and of exercises in transnational repression, including surveillance, harassment, kidnapping, and assassination that seek to extend the reach of governments to anywhere their dissenters might flee.

Weeks before the Hong Kong dissidents were stripped of passports and of funding from friends at home, British police arrested three men for monitoring UK-based dissidents on behalf of China's spy services.

Restrictions can be imposed in a slow-motion fashion. Last year, Belarus ended overseas renewal of passports. Belarusians seeking to extend sojourns outside the country must return home when their passports expire to get them renewed. There, they might face prosecution for anything they've said or done in freer countries against the Belarusian government.

"Apart from their passports, Belarusians living in exile are running into other problems stemming from a lack of consular services including not being able to register babies born abroad, receive paperwork necessary to get married, or have access to legal control of their property in Belarus," notes the report.

In other cases, controls are imposed on those still living under the jurisdiction of an authoritarian regime. After July's election in Venezuela resulted in a dubious victory for incumbent President Nicolás Maduro despite strong evidence of a win for the opposition, authorities detained thousands and restricted the mobility of those who might flee the country and challenge the regime from exile.

"The BBC has been told about dozens of people, including journalists and activists, whose passports have been revoked," the news service reported.

Locked Within Borders or Stranded Outside Them

Other countries try to keep dissidents outside their borders. India's government has stripped both passports and Indian citizenship from those considered politically suspect, making it difficult for them to enter the country.

Nicaragua's authoritarian rulers went a step further, expelling hundreds of political opponents, including potential presidential candidates, from the country to the U.S. and depriving them of their citizenship.

"The United States is imposing sanctions on the Nicaraguan judges who played a role in stripping over 300 Nicaraguans of their citizenship, leaving many of these individuals stateless," the U.S. State Department protested last year.

The most common restrictions, according to Freedom House, are travel bans—official and unofficial—which forbid people from exiting or entering a country. "At least 40 countries use this tactic, which is being applied not only to perceived government critics but also their families." These bans can be hard to challenge, such as India's reliance on unofficial no-fly lists to immobilize journalists and activists.

Making Permission To Travel a Tool of Repression

Restrictions on movement vary widely in whether they're targeted at keeping dissidents trapped at home or stranded outside depending on the desires of the authoritarian governments in question. But they're all meant to isolate and inconvenience anybody who annoys the powers-that-be by leveraging bureaucracy and the permission regime of modern travel credentials. By revoking a passport, citizenship, or some other "privilege" of the world of red tape, governments can punish opponents without the muss, fuss, and bad P.R. of overt repression.

Not that authoritarians are above imprisoning, beating, and killing their critics; they still frequently do so. But they now have another tool to wield as they seek to maintain control.

"The mobility controls described in this report are applied for political reasons and lack due process. For people targeted in this way, as well as their families, mobility controls produce a sense of powerlessness. Without paperwork or an official reason for why they cannot enter or leave a country or have documents renewed, people are left without legal recourse to challenge these human rights violations," the Freedom House authors caution.

True, canceled passports and lost citizenship are better than bullets in the head. But a world in which people need the permission of bureaucrats to come and go creates dangerous tools for authoritarians.