Spring 2026 Webinar – State Responses to Transnational Repression

The TRP hosted "State Responses to Transnational Repression" on February 5th, with Francesca Lessa, Marcus Michaelsen, Kirsten Roberts Lyer, and Puneet Kaur as featured panelists. 

Francesca Lessa is Associate Professor in International Relations of the Americas at University College London (UCL). She is also the Coordinator and Principal Researcher of the Plancondor.org project at UCL, and the Honorary President of the Observatorio Luz Ibarburu in Uruguay. Her book The Condor Trials: Transnational Repression and Human Rights in South America (Yale University Press, 2022) won the 2023 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America (Duke University) and the 2024 Premio Iberoamericano Book Award (Latin American Studies Association). She also co-authored the illustrated book Plan Cóndor: Viejos secretos y nuevos hallazgos (with Sebastián Santana Camargo, Reservoir Books, 2025, 2nd edition).

Marcus Michaelsen, PhD, is a researcher studying digital technologies, human rights activism and authoritarian politics. He works as a Senior Researcher at the Citizen Lab based at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto, where he focuses on digital transnational repression. Previously he was a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS) research group of Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a Senior Information Controls Fellow with the Open Technology Fund, a non-profit organisation supporting global internet freedom. From 2014 until 2018, Dr. Michaelsen was a post-doctoral researcher in the project Authoritarianism in a Global Age in the Political Science Department of the University of Amsterdam. His work on transnational repression has been published in Democratization, Globalizations, the European Journal of International Security, and Surveillance & Society, among others. 

Kirsten Roberts Lyer is Chair of the Human Rights Program and Associate Professor in the Department of Legal Studies at Central European University in Vienna. Her research examines independent state-based human rights bodies, including national human rights institutions (NHRIs), and their role in protecting rights and strengthening accountability. She is the co-author of National Human Rights Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2021) and has published on institutional independence and human rights protection. She serves on the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) Scientific Committee (2023–2028) and is a Member of the Council of Europe Working Group on the Democratic Mission of Higher Education. Before joining CEU, she spent 15 years in human rights practice, including as Director at the Irish Human Rights Commission (Ireland's NHRI) and as a legal officer at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She regularly advises international organizations on legislation and safeguards for independent human rights bodies, and strengthening parliamentary engagement with human rights. She is currently working on human rights based responses to transnational repression, having recently published Transnational Human Rights Violations: Addressing the Evolution of Globalized Repression through National Human Rights Institutions, in the Journal of Human Rights Practice with Andrew Chubb.

Puneet Kaur is the Senior State Policy Manager at the Sikh Coalition, the nation's largest Sikh Civil Rights organization. She brings over eight years of experience in public policy and advocacy rooted in close partnership with underserved and diverse communities. In her role at the Sikh Coalition, she leads statewide efforts in California and beyond to advance civil-rights protections, hate-crime prevention, and inclusive public-education policy, while playing a central role in the Sikh Coalition’s broader work to confront transnational repression impacting Sikh and other diaspora communities. Her work has helped move California toward a first-of-its-kind framework to train law enforcement to recognize and respond to transnational repression, ensuring government systems are better equipped to protect targeted communities. Puneet’s approach to policy is grounded in coalition-building, community education, and translating lived experiences into durable, systemic change.