Needing permission to travel hands a dangerous tool to authoritarians.
When you don’t like the rules—or rulers—where you live, and trying to change things isn’t worth the time, effort, or danger, one good response is to get the hell out. Find someplace that’s more to your taste by voting for something different with your feet. But what if the local powers-that-be don’t want dissidents to go and limit paths to exit? A new report says that’s exactly what many governments around the world are doing with restrictions on freedom of movement used as tools of political repression.
55 Governments Punish Critics by Restricting Movement
“The governments of at least 55 countries around the world, including India, Nicaragua, and Saudi Arabia, restrict freedom of movement to punish, coerce, or control people whom they view as political threats or opponents,” Freedom House announced last week about a report documenting such controls. “The four main tactics for restricting mobility are revoking citizenship, controlling access to key documents, denying consular services, and imposing travel bans.”
That report, No Way In or Out: Authoritarian Controls on the Freedom of Movement, by Amy Slipowitz, Jessica White, and Yana Gorokhovskaia, points out that travel restrictions often fly below the radar since they can be informally imposed and passed off as bureaucratic inefficiency that just happened to target opponents of the regime. They can also be imposed on those who flee overseas, leaving them stranded, separated from families, and stateless in their places of refuge.
Stripped of Passports
“They can apply to individual dissidents, like the six UK-based Hong Kong prodemocracy activists living in exile who recently had their passports canceled, as well as to…
