Assessing Germany’s Capacity to Counter Russian Transnational Repression

29 April 2026

The International Partnership for Human Rights (IPHR) and the State Capture Accountability Project (SCAP) have published an in‑depth report assessing Germany’s legal, institutional, and policy capacity to counter transnational repression (TNR), with a particular focus on repression perpetrated by the Russian Federation following its full‑scale invasion of Ukraine.

Germany, as one of the world’s leading host countries for migrants and political exiles, has increasingly become a target environment for authoritarian repression, including surveillance, intimidation, digital attacks, proxy threats against family members, and even assassinations carried out on its territory.

Key findings of the report include:

Transnational repression remains insufficiently recognised as a standalone phenomenon in German law and policy, often subsumed under espionage, terrorism, or general criminal offences;
Germany lacks a coherent national strategy to prevent, document, and respond to TNR, resulting in fragmented institutional responses and limited victim protection;
Criminal law provisions (such as espionage and state security offences) allow prosecution of certain acts, but fail to capture the systematic and target‑focused nature of TNR campaigns;
Asylum, deportation, and extradition procedures remain vulnerable to misuse by authoritarian states, despite formal safeguards against political persecution;
Misuse of INTERPOL mechanisms and judicial cooperation frameworks continues to pose serious risks to exiled dissidents;
Digital surveillance, spyware attacks, and online harassment play an increasingly central role in repression campaigns against journalists and activists in exile.

Through detailed case studies—including the assassination of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin, suspected poisonings, spyware attacks against exiled journalists, and the targeting of German civil society organisations—the report illustrates how authoritarian repression penetrates democratic spaces, often below the threshold of criminal prosecution.

The report further highlights structural and operational protection gaps, including:

the absence of safe, accessible, and trusted reporting mechanisms;
limited specialised support services for affected individuals;
inconsistent risk assessments by law enforcement and migration authorities;
insufficient training and awareness at the local and federal levels.

Notably, the report’s findings are closely aligned with the conclusions of the Coalition Against Transnational Repression in Germany, as outlined in its 2025 policy paper on tackling transnational repression in Germany. Both analyses highlight persistent protection gaps, the lack of dedicated reporting and support mechanisms, weak institutional coordination, and the vulnerability of asylum, extradition, and law‑enforcement frameworks to misuse by authoritarian states. This convergence underscores the consistency of civil society and expert assessments regarding the urgent need for a comprehensive, victim‑centred national response to transnational repression in Germany.

The IPHR report recommends that Germany: