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Thank you to @FT & @VALERIEin140 for drawing attention to Turkey's transnational campaign of kidnappings: https://www.ft.com/content/d99f7b3d-5dcc-4894-a455-1af5a433175f?desktop=true&segmentId=d8d3e364-5197-20eb-17cf-2437841d178a#myft:notification:instant-email:content
We @freedomhouse have been tracking this campaign since 2016, and studying global transnational repression campaigns for a new report to come out in two weeks.
Turkey has rendered people from more countries than any other country in the world in the last 6 years.
Turkey has rendered people from more countries than any other country in the world in the last 6 years.
This campaign is global, overt, and illegal. In all Turkish cases we've seen, it involves intense cooperation with the host state, undermining rule of law in those countries and violating the rights of the individuals who are kidnapped.
We cannot allow this kind of extraterritorial claim of control over nationals abroad to become normalized or accepted. Just as there must not be impunity for Saudi Arabia's killing of Jamal Khashoggi, there must not be impunity for Turkey's kidnappings.
For my previous writing about Turkey's campaign, see @ForeignAffairs in January 2018: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/turkey/2018-01-29/remarkable-scale-turkeys-global-purge, @washingtonpost in March 2018: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2018/04/01/turkey-just-snatched-six-of-its-citizens-from-another-country/
For more of our work on global transnational repression, see my Congressional testimony in Sept 2019: testimony in the US Congress in Sept 2019: https://www.csce.gov/sites/helsinkicommission.house.gov/files/SCHENKKAN%20Nate%20-%20Testimony.pdf as well as our collection of essays with scholars: https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-report/2020/perspectives-everyday-transnational-repression-age-globalization from June 2020