On 24 June 2025, President of the Open Dialogue Foundation Lyudmyla Kozlovska testified at a hearing of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the U.S. Congress on transnational repression. The hearing focused on testimonies of several human rights experts, and the following discussion focused on policies and instruments that should be employed to prevent and fight this increasingly dangerous phenomenon.
download written testimony
Transnational repression remains one of the major issues concerning our human rights efforts. ODF’s experience includes both being targeted by and fighting authoritarian regimes attempting to silence their critics overseas.
Illegal surveillance, malicious prosecution reaching foreign soil, Interpol, extradition and all forms of legal assistance and cybersecurity abuse, SLAPP lawsuits, threats, persecution of associates and family members, abductions and assassinations are only some of the usual instruments employed by authoritarian and other illiberal regimes. One of the most refined, perfidious and notorious of them remains the manipulation of the Western justice and financial systems to weaponise one’s banking data. This leads to systemic problems, from financial exclusion to fabrication of criminal cases, enabled by the misuse of AML/CFT regulations in the US and other Western countries.
Lyudmyla presented, amongst others, a highly worrying persecution case of a Kazakh entrepreneur and human rights defender Barlyk Mendygaziyev, founder of the “Freedom Kazakhstan Foundation”. Due to his philanthropic work and advocacy efforts, Barlyk’s brother, Bekizhan, was jailed and tortured in Kazakhstan, while he, being a US resident (living in North Carolina), faced closure of his bank accounts.
She also described how Kazakhstani special services operatives tried to take down ODF’s reports on their human rights abuses by faking criminal defamation complaints in Belgium and detailed how the Kyrgyz Bakai Bank has been manipulating the Belgian justice against us, in retaliation for disclosing its role in evading sanctions imposed on Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine.
How should the US and other democratic countries react to transnational repression?
- Cease to share intelligence, legal, and other sensitive personal information with authoritarian states;
- Reform overly restrictive and vague AML frameworks (including on the G7 level, FATF recommendations and US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network regulations) and develop effective remedies against their misapplication;
- Fight SLAPPs linked to foreign governments and their agents;
- Protect dissidents, political refugees, their associates and diaspora communities; safeguard their privacy and freedom of speech;
- Thoroughly investigate all reported abuse – by extrajudicial means and abuse of power alike;
- Apply the Global Magnitsky Act consistently to human rights violators worldwide to hold them accountable;
- Start to enforce sanctions against hostile, rogue states rigorously, first and foremost, against Russia, their proxies and enablers;
- Recognise and embrace peer-to-peer transactions, encrypted communication tools and Bitcoin’s vital role in promoting human rights and enabling humanitarian work.
The Transnational Repression: Trends and Policy Approaches hearing was chaired by Rep. James P. McGovern and included testimonies of the following witnesses:
- Yana Gorokhovskaia, Research Director for Strategy and Design, Freedom House
- Lyudmyla Kozlovska, President, Open Dialogue Foundation
- Ahmad Noorani, Editor, Fact Focus
- Ria Chakrabarty, Senior Policy Director, Hindus for Human Rights
- Joey Siu, Spokesperson, Amnesty International Hong Kong Overseas
- Paulo Figueiredo, Investigative Journalist
In 1983, congressmen Tom Lantos (D-CA) and John Edward Porter (R-IL) founded the bipartisan Congressional Human Rights Caucus (CHRC). The CHRC was dedicated to the defence of all rights codified in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After the death of Tom Lantos in 2008, on the Speaker’s initiative, the CHRC was institutionalised as a full entity in the House of Representatives of the U.S. Congress. The mission of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission is to promote, defend and advocate internationally recognized human rights norms as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and other relevant human rights instruments. The Commission is named in honor of Thomas Peter Lantos (D-CA), who was the only Holocaust survivor to ever serve in the U.S. Congress (1980–2008), an anti-Nazi resistance fighter and a prominent human rights advocate.
Video recording of the hearing:
Read also:
- SLAPP & Transnational Financial Repression across Belgium/EU and the United States: The Case Against Lyudmyla Kozlovska and the Open Dialogue Foundation (June 11, 2025)
- The Price of Exposing Sanctions Violations: Bakai Bank’s Legal Attack on the Open Dialogue Foundation (March 4, 2025)
- Reports: Transnational Repression against Barlyk Mendygaziyev (March 7, 2025 and July 5, 2024)
- Political Persecution of Barlyk Mendygaziyev (August 11, 2021)
