ARTICLE 19 remains deeply concerned by the threats made to exiled Pakistani filmmaker, human rights activist, and researcher Roshaan Khattak. The threats – linked to Pakistani state actors – are a clear case of transnational repression (TNR), which the United Kingdom government must respond to by protecting Khattak and other targets.
On 6 October 2025, ARTICLE 19 signed an open letter to the Office for Students, the regulator of higher education in the UK, demonstrating the impact that transnational repression has on academic freedom and calling for tailored and robust protections for academics, students, and support staff facing threats of TNR. This letter followed significant concerns regarding the safety of researcher and activist Roshaan Khattak, who was enrolled as a postgraduate student at Cambridge University at the time of writing.
In January 2026, ARTICLE 19 issued a further statement highlighting threats and acts of violence against Pakistani dissidents living in the UK, including Khattak, and urged the government to ensure that targets of TNR can access the protection measures that the UK is obligated to provide.
Since the letter and statement were issued, the UK authorities have taken very little action to protect or even engage with Khattak. Meanwhile, Cambridge University has ejected Khattak from campus and informed him that he will not be allowed to progress with his PhD, reinforcing the silencing effect of the threats originating from Pakistan. The Committee for Academic Freedom’s letter of February 2026, submitted in light of the new free speech rules introduced in August 2025 and acknowledged at the time by the Vice-Chancellor, worryingly remains unanswered.
Khattak’s July 2025 ejection from Wolfson College at Cambridge resulted in him losing all his belongings, including computers containing sensitive data. It is deeply alarming that, despite their identification of the individual involved in the confiscation and acknowledgement of the possibility of TNR, UK police have still failed to recover the belongings.
In an article recently published in the summer 2026 issue of the Index on Censorship quarterly magazine, Khattak discloses concerning incidents, including two unexplained blasts at his college accommodation, and describes how Cambridge responded to credible threats against him – including death threats that indicated knowledge of his movements. He argues that the university’s response was ‘wrapped in bureaucratic obfuscation: words like “capacity”, “protocol,” and “risk assessment”’ were used to justify its inaction.
Instead of coordinating with the UK authorities, who have a duty to provide protection to targets of TNR like Khattak, the university relied on the apparent neutrality of administrative language to abdicate any responsibility for Khattak’s safety, while effectively terminating his studies and treating a student’s research as a ‘liability item quietly struck from a balance sheet’. Human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith has argued that this raises serious concerns, explaining that ‘where a researcher is documenting allegations of atrocity crimes and is targeted as a result, institutional choices that assist attempts to silence that research are not merely unfortunate, they raise questions of facilitative complicity’.
ARTICLE 19 urges authorities to place threats in context and carry out risk assessments that consider the link between attacks and threats and the expression of the target, with the aim of conducting thorough investigations and developing protection plans for targets of TNR. Universities have a role to play in helping authorities assess these threats and ensuring students, faculty, and staff who may be targets of TNR can access the protection they need.