A UN-appointed expert has set out how Russia pursues its critics after they leave the country. On Monday 21 September, Mariana Katzarova, the Human Rights Council's Special Rapporteur on human rights in Russia, presented her report, titled Nowhere is safe, to the Council in Geneva. UN News reports that she told delegates Moscow has built a state system to "intimidate and punish critics abroad and coerce their families at home".
According to UN News, the report draws on nearly 400 documented cases and finds that Russian repression abroad has risen sharply since the 2022 invasion, with between 650,000 and 900,000 people leaving the country. UN News reports that documented incidents rose roughly eight-fold, from 29 in the eight years before 2022 to 89 in the three years since.
UN News also reports that Ms. Katzarova pointed to assassinations, poisonings and assaults targeting exiled journalists and activists. She told delegates that Russia files more INTERPOL red notices than any other country. UN News adds that roughly half of those reviewed in 2024 were found to breach INTERPOL's own rules. She described a Chechen torture survivor held for 18 months in Kazakhstan under a Russian extradition request.
"There is nothing inevitable about transnational repression," she said, calling for a binding UN convention setting out the duties of host states to screen Russian arrest requests and protect people at risk.
For UK protection teams, this is a threat picture rather than a travel advisory. Principals who are Russian exiles, dissidents, journalists or activists, and their families, face a risk that follows them across borders. It can arrive as physical harm, as pressure on relatives still in Russia, or as legal process. The INTERPOL finding matters for movement planning: teams should assume a red notice could surface at a border or during a transit stop, and the travel routes of an at-risk principal deserve the same scrutiny as their home and work locations.
UN News notes that the Special Rapporteur and the commission's members serve in an independent, unpaid capacity and do not speak for the UN. We could not open the report itself from our systems, so every figure above is as UN News reports it. The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, which also briefed the Council, will report fully to the UN General Assembly in October.
