The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been widening the legal landscape for imposing exit bans and is increasing their use against everyone from human rights defenders to foreign journalists.
Safeguard Defenders’ new report Trapped: China’s Expanding Use of Exit Bans uses official data, an examination of new laws and interviews with victims to explore how the country is increasingly resorting to exit bans to punish human rights defenders (HRDs) and their families, hold people hostage to force targets overseas to come back to China (a practice called persuade to return, a form of transnational repression), control ethnic-religious groups, engage in hostage diplomacy and intimidate foreign journalists.
[Exit Ban: state-initiated ban on an individual from leaving the country, either at the border or by cancelling or confiscating their passport.]
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