The sovereign prerogative of states has never been confined within territorial boundaries alone. Throughout modern history, governments have sought to extend their political authority beyond their borders to surveil, coerce, and silence those who contest their legitimacy from abroad. What has changed in the contemporary period is not the impulse itself, but the sophistication, reach, and institutional embeddedness of the mechanisms through which it is exercised. The targeted killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil, the alleged orchestration of assassination plots on American territory, the systematic intimidation of activists in Britain and Germany.

Transnational Repression as a State Practice

Transnational repression refers to the efforts of governments to silence, harass, surveillance, coerce, or physically harm individuals located outside their own territorial jurisdiction, typically targeting diaspora communities, political exiles, or opposition figures abroad. The concept has gained significant scholarly traction in recent years, particularly following the high-profile assassinations of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018 and the poisoning of Russian dissident Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in the same year. Freedom House has documented over 854 transnational repression incidents across 38 countries since 2014, identifying the practice as a growing global phenomenon.

Cooley and Heathershaw, in their foundational work on authoritarian gravity, distinguish between several modalities of transnational repression: direct physical attacks, including assassination and kidnapping; non-physical coercion, including surveillance, digital attacks, and harassment; the mobilisation of diaspora informants and proxies; and the deployment of legal mechanisms through international institutional frameworks.

The Sikh Diaspora as a Case Study

The Sikh diaspora is one of the most politically organised and internationally visible diaspora communities in the world. Numbering approximately 25 to 30 million globally, with major concentrations in Canada (estimated 770,000), the United Kingdom (approximately 430,000), and the United States (approximately 500,000), Sikh communities abroad have developed sophisticated transnational political networks that engage with both host country politics and the politics of the Punjab. The Khalistan movement encompasses a spectrum of positions from those advocating armed struggle to those pursuing constitutional or diplomatic means, notwithstanding its significant decline as a militant movement within India following the suppression of the Punjab insurgency.

The Indian state’s securitisation of Khalistan advocacy has produced a context in which ordinary political expression attending rallies, signing petitions, speaking publicly in support of a referendum on Sikh self-determination, organising cultural or religious events has been treated as equivalent to support for terrorism. This conflation, as the following sections demonstrate, has had profound implications for the rights of Sikh activists abroad and has provided the legal and political architecture through which transnational repression has been conducted.

International Legal Framework

Under customary international law, a state bears responsibility for internationally wrongful acts attributable to it, including acts committed by its organs or agents acting in their official capacity. The International Law Commission’s Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA) provides the foundational framework for this analysis. Where Indian state agents whether intelligence officers, diplomatic personnel, or contracted proxies have engaged in surveillance, intimidation, or violence against individuals in third states, the conduct is attributable to India under ARSIWA Article 4 (acts of state organs) or Article 8 (acts directed or controlled by the state), subject to the requirements of effective control.

Documented Operations Across Jurisdictions

The killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar on 18 June 2023 in Surrey, British Columbia, constitutes the pivotal event in the Canadian dimension of this analysis. Nijjar, a Canadian citizen and prominent Khalistan activist who had been designated a terrorist by India under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in 2020, was shot dead outside a Sikh temple. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly attributed the killing to Indian government agents in September 2023, triggering a diplomatic crisis of exceptional severity between two Commonwealth nations. India denied involvement. The subsequent expulsion of diplomatic personnel by both sides, and Canada’s formal communication of its concerns to allied governments through intelligence-sharing mechanisms, elevated the case to a matter of multilateral geopolitical significance.

The Nijjar case is analytically significant for several reasons. First, it represents the alleged execution of a state-sponsored killing on the soil of a liberal democratic ally, demonstrating that transnational repression is not confined to the neighbourhood of repressive states or to the territories of states with weak rule-of-law institutions. Second, it illustrates the interaction between legal designation mechanisms and physical violence: Nijjar’s terrorism designation under Indian law formed part of the political justification for his targeting, exemplifying the dynamic this article identifies as legal weaponisation in service of physical repression. Third, the case prompted an unprecedented degree of public diplomatic confrontation, testing the limits of alliance management in the face of evidence of state-sponsored violence.

Law as a Tool of Transnational Repression: An Analytical Framework

The existing literature on transnational repression has focused predominantly on its violent and coercive dimensions: assassinations, kidnappings, surveillance, digital attacks, and the mobilisation of proxies. Insufficient attention has been paid to the ways in which legal mechanisms are domestically enacted and internationally deployed function as instruments of transnational repression.

Legal weaponisation, involves the deployment of formal legal instruments and institutional frameworks. The key analytical question is not whether a particular legal instrument has the form of law but whether it serves the function of repression: whether its application is aimed at silencing political expression, intimidating activists, delegitimising movements, or creating material burdens on individuals that impede their ability to engage in protected political activity.

Terrorism Designations as Instruments of Repression

India’s use of terrorism designations under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) against Sikh activists abroad is perhaps the most significant and underanalysed mechanism of legal transnational repression in the present case. The UAPA, as amended in 2019, permits the designation of individuals as terrorists based on executive decision, without judicial review at the designation stage, and with significant procedural obstacles to challenge. The designation of prominent Khalistan activists including individuals who are foreign citizens, whose activities are lawful in their countries of residence, and whose political advocacy falls squarely within the protections of international human rights law as terrorists under Indian domestic law has several consequences that constitute, this article argues, a form of extraterritorial repression.

First, UAPA designations serve a delegitimisation function: they attach the label of terrorism to individuals whose actual conduct consists of political speech and association, thereby stigmatising them in the Indian public sphere and, potentially, in international contexts where Indian diplomatic pressure is brought to bear on host state governments. Second, they provide legal justification, however legally unfounded, for coercive measures against designated individuals, including the alleged targeting of Hardeep Singh Nijjar documented above. Third, they create legal risks for third parties’ family members, business associates, community organisations who maintain connections with designated individuals, producing a chilling effect that extends well beyond the individual target.

The use of terrorism designations against diaspora political activists raises fundamental questions about the compatibility of such designations with India’s obligations under international human rights law. The Human Rights Committee has made clear, in its jurisprudence under ICCPR Article 19, that restrictions on freedom of expression in the name of national security must be necessary and proportionate and may not be applied to suppress legitimate political advocacy.

Implications for International Law and Global Governance

One of the most significant theoretical and policy implications of the Indian case is what might be termed the democratic exception problem: the assumption, embedded in much of the transnational repression literature and in public discourse, that democratic states do not engage in transnational repression. This assumption, which informs both scholarly frameworks and diplomatic practice, is empirically untenable in the light of the documented record examined in this article. India’s status as the world’s largest democracy has, if anything, complicated international responses to its alleged conduct, as partner governments have been reluctant to draw the institutional consequences of their findings from the applicable legal frameworks.

The democratic exception problem has both descriptive and normative dimensions. Descriptively, it produces analytical blind spots that impede recognition and documentation of transnational repression by democratic states. Normatively, it generates diplomatic pressures that constrain host state responses as the comparatively muted US reaction to the Pannun case, relative to the Canadian reaction to the Nijjar killing, may illustrate. Addressing this problem requires both a revision of scholarly frameworks to accommodate the possibility of democratic transnational repression and a firming of diplomatic and legal responses to ensure that the democratic credentials of a repressing state do not serve as a barrier to accountability.