Transnational Repression - Expert input to the Legal Affairs Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe

On 13 May 2025, the Legal Affairs & Human Rights Committee (JUR) of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) held a hearing in the context of its ongoing file ‘Fighting back against transnational repression’ (TNR).

JUR heard from experts Alex Tinsley (Doughty Street / ECBA / Lawyers Against Transnational Repression); Dr Saipira Furstenberg (editor of Transnational Repression in the Age of Globalisation (2024)); and Stephen Reimer (Royal United Services Institute / Sciences-Po).

The hearing considered INTERPOL and recent proposals for reform of INTERPOL's complaints mechanism, the Commission for the Control of Files (CCF); mutual legal assistance, including the current topic of the UN Convention on Cybercrime as a potential vehicle for TNR; general issues with policy-making on TNR; and the weaponisation of Financial Action Task Force standards and financial intelligence tools.

My (Alex Tinsley) comments were underpinned by a  written paper, which is supplied below. This covers : (1) INTERPOL reform; (2) TNR and Mutual Legal Assistance, including the current topic of interception of telecommunications via MLA; and (3) Policy-making on TNR more generally.

JUR's ongoing work continues a long thread of PACE work aiming to deal with TNR, originally focused on TNR via INTERPOL (2017-2019) and expanding from 2021 to cover other vectors of TNR including abuse of legal cooperation and spyware.