Transnational repression: how authoritarian regimes reach across borders to kill dissent
Sat 18 April 2026
17:00
Free
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China, Iran, Russia, Nicaragua and other authoritarian regimes carry out a sophisticated repression campaign to coerce, control or silence political opponents and dissidents living overseas. These regimes rely on private security firms, professional hackers, nongovernmental organizations with access to U.N. proceedings, retired or corrupt law enforcement officials in foreign countries and spies. Meanwhile, host nations struggle to protect government targets against attacks and intimidation.
Alecci, who led ICIJ’s China Targets investigation based on confidential Chinese government records and interviews with 105 victims around the world; Miller, a lead reporter on The Washington Post’s transnational repression series covering Iran, China and Turkey; Roman Anin, the founder and editor-in-chief of Russian independent media outlet IStories, and Reed Brody, a member of the United Nations Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua, will talk about some of the most secretive and insidious state-run repression efforts, and their implications for targets and democracies alike.
Moderated by Gerard Ryle.
Organised in association with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
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Scilla Alecci
Scilla Alecci is an investigative reporter and video journalist for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). She is also partnership coordinator for Asia and Europe and has led some of ICIJ's award-winning investigations. A native of Italy, Scilla was previously based in Tokyo where she worked for Bloomberg News and other news organisations. In 2016 she was a member of the Japanese reporting team that took part in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Panama Papers investigation. Scilla holds master’s degrees in East Asian studies and journalism, and in 2017 published a book in Japanese about the Panama Papers and the new frontiers of investigative journalism. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops for reporters from many countries, including Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, the Philippines and China.
Roman Anin
Roman Anin is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of iStories Media. He began his career at the daily Novaya Gazeta where his stories revealed corruption and cronyism in the military, politics and business, including construction contracts for the Sochi Olympic Games. He was a member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation Panama Papers, which uncovered $2 billion in secret offshore deals and loans that benefited the close circle of President Vladimir Putin. In 2019, he founded the independent investigative outlet Important Stories (iStories). iStories recently produced an investigation into Telegram’s infrastructure and its links to Russian authorities. Roman is the winner of the 2020 ICFJ Knight Trailblazer Award and the 2021 European Press Prize Investigative Reporting Award.
Reed Brody
Reed Brody, former Advocacy Director of Human Rights Watch, has helped redefine the possibilities of transnational justice, developing innovative strategies that empower victims and reshape legal norms. Brody spent 18 years working with the survivors of Hissène Habré, the former dictator of Chad, whose 2016 conviction for crimes against humanity in Senegal marked the first and only time a former head of state was convicted of human rights crimes in the domestic courts of another country. His work on the Habré case and with the victims of Augusto Pinochet, Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti, and Yahya Jammeh of Gambia has been featured in five films, including The Dictator Hunter. He has uncovered U.S.-backed war crimes in Nicaragua, led United Nations missions investigating abuses in El Salvador and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and helped expose the Bush administration’s torture program in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. In 2024, he was appointed by the UN to investigate repression in contemporary Nicaragua. His most recent book, To Catch a Dictator (Columbia University Press, 2022), was called “an absorbing saga” (Washington Post), and “a magnificent narrative … a judicial thriller.” (le Monde).
Greg Miller
Greg Miller is Chief Correspondent, International Investigations, at The Washington Post. He is one of The Post’s most accomplished reporters, with an extraordinary record in breaking some of the most important international and national-security stories of the last two decades. Since becoming an International Investigations correspondent in 2020, Greg has been central to stories on a wide range of reporting targets, including the war in Ukraine; the CIA’s clandestine role in turning Ukraine’s intelligence services into potent allies against the Kremlin; the Indian spy service’s involvement in assassination plots in North America; the King of Jordan’s use of shell companies to hide his ownership of a collection of oceanfront villas in California; and the extraordinary path of a Russian spy who gained admission to one of the most prestigious universities in Washington. Previously, as a national security reporter, Greg unearthed stories at the core of The Post’s coverage of Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign, and then drew from reporting around the newsroom in writing The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy (2018). He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize as part of teams: in 2014 for Public Service for The Post’s stories about U.S. surveillance programs exposed by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, and in 2018 for National Reporting for the work on Russian interference. Earlier, Greg spent 16 years as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where he covered business and technology in Los Angeles, Orange County and Silicon Valley before moving to Washington to cover national security. He grew up in California, and graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a degree in economics before earning a master’s in journalism at Stanford.
Gerard Ryle
Gerard Ryle is the director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). He led the worldwide teams of journalists working on the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigations, the biggest in journalism history. Under his leadership over the past seven years, ICIJ has become one of the best-known journalism brands in the world. Reporters Without Borders has described Ryle’s work with ICIJ as "the future of investigative journalism worldwide" when naming him as one of "100 information heroes" of worldwide significance. Before joining as ICIJ’s first non-American director in September 2011, Ryle spent more than 20 years working as an investigative reporter and editor in Australia. His work as a journalist began in his native Ireland. He was later a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan, and in 2013 he accepted an honorary doctorate from the University of Liege, on behalf of ICIJ. Ryle is a book author and TED speaker and he has won...