Repression Without Borders: How Pakistan Silences Critics Overseas
At a minimum, US agencies should treat credible allegations of Pakistani transnational repression as a national security and civil liberties issue.
Pakistan’s generals have long understood a simple political truth: repression works best when it travels. In 2025, under the tightened grip of Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan’s coercive toolkit has become more systematic and increasingly transnational.
Dissidents can flee Karachi, Lahore, or Quetta, build new lives in London, Toronto, or New York, and still find that the Pakistani state can reach them: through intimidation, digital harassment, legal choke points, and the most potent leverage of all—family members left behind.
This is not a theoretical concern. Pakistan’s deteriorating human rights environment has been documented in the US government’s own reporting, which describes harassment of activists and threats that extend to families.
In the US State Department’s 2024 human rights report on Pakistan, state agencies are described as routinely harassing activists, including those connected to “missing persons” advocacy, within a broader pattern of intimidation and curbs on civil liberties.
That domestic environment matters because transnational repression typically scales from a home base of impunity: if the state can silence you at home without consequence, it can experiment with silencing you abroad.
Digital Fear and Legalized Censorship
The methods are familiar across authoritarian systems, but Pakistan’s playbook has its own distinct blend. First comes digital pressure: surveillance, doxxing, account reporting campaigns, and the weaponization of “cybercrime” narratives to stigmatize dissent.
Amnesty’s recent reporting on Pakistan has described a climate in which journalists increasingly experience surveillance as a “cost” of doing their work, alongside harassment and coercion.
In the diaspora context, the point is not just to gather information; it is to create ambient fear and make exiles feel that their phones, emails, or social accounts are porous, and that any conversation can be turned into a weapon.
The regime’s second instrument is censorship, increasingly packaged in the language of legality. In 2025, Pakistan’s censorship architecture has expanded through court orders and regulatory demands under cyber laws that are elastic enough to be applied against almost any speech labeled “anti-state.”
Reporters Without Borders documented a major escalation when an Islamabad court ordered 27 YouTube channels blocked under Pakistan’s PECA framework, including channels associated with exiled journalists and domestic reporters.
What matters here is not only that Pakistan can block content inside its territory; it is that Pakistan is attempting to build a legal paper trail by court orders, administrative directions, and “national security” rationales that can be forwarded to platforms and intermediaries, inviting compliance that has global effects.
A platform headquartered in California may not be bound by Pakistani law in theory, but in practice, platforms weigh market access, legal exposure, and staff safety—pressures that authoritarian regulators know how to exploit.
Constitutional Capture and the Expansion of Coercion
This is where Pakistan’s internal constitutional drift becomes inseparable from its transnational posture. A government that must answer to independent courts and a competitive parliament is constrained in how it treats dissidents.
A government that can reshape the judiciary and constitutional order is freer to press its demands beyond borders. That is why Pakistan’s 27th constitutional amendment, which was passed in November 2025, has triggered alarm well beyond South Asia.
The amendment expands the army chief’s powers through a new top command role and simultaneously curbs the Supreme Court, shifting constitutional jurisdiction toward a new court structure and consolidating authority in ways critics describe as profoundly anti-democratic.
Analysts around the world have argued that the change moves Pakistan closer to institutionalized authoritarian rule, embedding military dominance in the constitutional architecture itself.
Pakistan’s defenders often respond that this is merely counter-disinformation, that “anti-state” channels spread destabilizing claims, and that censorship is a sovereign prerogative. But sovereignty ends where other sovereigns begin.
When intimidation campaigns reach US residents, when diaspora activists self-censor in American cities, when protests are chilled because relatives in Pakistan may pay the price, the Pakistani state is no longer regulating speech at home; it is projecting coercion into another constitutional order. That projection collides directly with foundational American principles.
The US Constitution’s protection of speech and assembly is not a courtesy extended by the state, but a restraint imposed on power. When foreign governments intimidate people on US soil for expressing political views, especially through threats, harassment, and coercion via family members abroad, they are effectively attempting to rewrite the boundaries of American liberty.
Nor should we isolate this issue from Pakistan’s broader rights climate. Pakistan’s military-dominated politics, intensified by the recent constitutional engineering, coexist with persistent allegations of abuse against political opponents and minority communities. In regions such as Balochistan, rights groups have long documented crackdowns on peaceful activism, enforced disappearances allegations, and pressure on journalists.
The Cost of Looking Away
For US policymakers, the takeaway should be sobering. A Pakistan that consolidates military rule while exporting intimidation through legal and digital channels is not merely a troubled democracy; it is a state developing the habits of a transnationally repressive regime.
Washington can, and often does, pursue pragmatic engagement with Islamabad on regional stability, counterterrorism, and other economic issues, including establishing a supply chain network for critical minerals. But engagement without guardrails risks becoming complicity.
At a minimum, US agencies should treat credible allegations of Pakistani transnational repression as a national security and civil liberties issue. Washington must document cases, support threatened communities, and insist that bilateral cooperation cannot be a shield for coercion on American soil.
Field Marshal Asim Munir may believe that distance dissolves dissent, but distance should do the opposite. It should protect freedom by placing dissidents beyond the reach of intimidation.
If Munir’s Pakistan is allowed to normalize transnational repression through threats to families, digitally enforced fear, and court-stamped censorship, it will not just silence Pakistanis abroad. It will erode the principle that in democratic societies, speech is not something you ask permission to exercise, it is something no foreign regime should be able to take away.
