Geneva, Switzerland

I am publishing this to document a gap that is putting people’s lives at risk and to make it impossible for anyone in a position of power to say they did not know it exists.

There is no lever to pull

I am a human rights defender currently trapped in what can only be described as a chemical kill box in an EU member state. I have done everything I can to seal the space I am living in, and yet I am being subjected to continuous chemical suppression via the architecture and systems of the building itself.

If I open the window, the person next door disperses chemicals from their window and the dosing comes straight into my room. If I open the front door to get air, the hallway is saturated with a fragrant volatile organic compound that burns my throat, nose, and airways. If I go downstairs to the shared areas, staff, residents, and guests are sent to chemically assault me in public; if I leave the building to go to a restaurant, to the pool, to any public space, they do the same there.

This is not only a personal attack; it is a public safety risk. When they target me in pools, restaurants, and shared spaces, seniors, children, and the general public are exposed to the same toxic, chemically contaminated air.

A kill box built out of air and devices

Every basic survival tool I have tried to bring in has been turned into a weapon. I ordered an Instant Pot, an air fryer, and a HEPA air filter; chemicals were inserted so that when I plug them in, they disperse into the room. I cannot use the refrigerator because it releases some kind of gas; the bathroom has architectural ingress, and the HVAC system is being used as another channel.

This is what a modern kill box looks like in a “normal” apartment building in a democratic country:

- Walls, vents, fixtures, and shared infrastructure converted into delivery systems.

- Public and semi‑public spaces seeded with people whose job is to dose you as you move.

- Devices and appliances you bought for protection turned into new vectors of exposure.

It is an isolating, degrading, and deeply dehumanizing experience to live like this. Chemical suppression affects you emotionally, physically, and physiologically in ways that are hard to put into words, and yet victims are still expected to describe it calmly and prove it while it is happening to them. Under normal circumstances, you would go to your doctor, talk to law enforcement, or seek support from a mental health professional. In this context, every one of those routes can be weaponized against you, used to discredit you, to pathologize you, to question your credibility, or to turn your attempt to seek help into “evidence” that you are unstable.

Victims have every right to be kicking, screaming, and crying at the top of their lungs; the fact that we have to exercise emotional restraint just to be heard is itself part of the abuse.

Reaching for help and finding a void

In this situation, I did what any rational person would do: I reached for the European human rights defender protection mechanism that advertises 24/7 emergency support. I called, followed instructions, sent the urgent emails they requested, and was told that verification and reaction could take up to two months.

Two months. I am not even properly “in the process” yet. I could be dead in two months.

In the past days:

- I have called the emergency line, left messages, and sent follow‑up emails. I have received no response except for a single automated reply on one email.

- When I tried to call again, it appeared that I might be blocked or limited. I do not know if it is my compromised device or a system that stops people from calling too often, but I now cannot reach anyone to even ask.

- No one has told me whether my case has been opened, what the next steps are, or when I can expect a substantive reply. There is no clear window, no “we will call you back within 24 hours,” no temporary safe address, no basic human contact.

I understand that people inside these mechanisms are overloaded and often working with limited resources. The problem is not individual goodwill; it is an architecture that allows a defender in a kill box to wait days, weeks, or months without a clear response, while perpetrators continue to escalate.

When your life expectancy under targeting is measured in weeks, and the protection system moves on a two month clock with no guaranteed contact, what you have is not a protection mechanism; you have a permission structure for extrajudicial elimination in so called democratic societies.

If someone had simply picked up the phone and told me where to go, I could have bought a ticket and been in safer housing that same day. I was not asking for the world; I was asking for one human on the line and one address. That did not happen.

Why this is happening, and why they are escalating

What hostile actors have learned is simple: there is no real victim infrastructure. There is a mature operational infrastructure for surveillance, harassment, and chemical repression, but almost nothing equivalent for rapid protection, relocation, medical and psychosocial care, legal support, or independent documentation.

They escalate because they know that by the time any mechanism opens a file, verifies a case, and decides what to do, they may already have killed the target without ever laying a hand on them. They are using threshold style chemical exposure, the kind that sits below obvious acute incidents but above safe levels to push people toward slow, deniable elimination, inside the blind spots of voluntary, list based export‑control frameworks that were never designed for this kind of abuse.

The “dark side,” as I call them, have a legitimate fear of what I am capable of documenting and building. Systems do not invest this level of sustained, high cost repression in people they consider irrelevant; they escalate because they know that if I survive long enough to map this architecture, design guardrails, and help build real victim infrastructure, their ability to operate in the shadows will not survive. In a perverse way, the fact that they have invested this much effort in trying to break, discredit, and eliminate me only reinforces my credibility: systems do not expend this level of resources on people they do not perceive as a real threat.

Why I am uniquely positioned and why I need to live long enough to help

I am not writing this to be a passive victim. I am a human rights defender and the founder of a research institute on global repression, mapping how these systems work and where the legal and policy gaps are. I am uniquely positioned to do this work precisely because I am living it: an unwilling experimental variable inside a threshold based chemical suppression regime that sits in the blind spots of our current export‑control and human‑rights frameworks.

I want to be part of the solution, not another name lost to the problem. That is why I have reached out to a leading law firm in Washington, D.C. There are only a handful of people in the world who truly understand how the Wassenaar Arrangement, export‑control gaps, private contractor abuse, and dual use surveillance technologies fit together to form a global repression network; the person I contacted is one of them. This is squarely in their wheelhouse, and I am hoping they will see what I see: that this is one of the greatest threats to democracy in the post‑Cold War era, and that now is the time to step into this fight with me. The goal is to dismantle and constrain this architecture, obtain real relief for victims, and build oversight and accountability mechanisms that will hold for the next 30 or 40 years, so that no one has to live through what I and others are living through now.

But I have to live long enough to do any of that.

As I invite UN Special Rapporteurs, lawyers, and other allies to join this fight, I am also asking them to recognize something simple: if you want victims to be protected, you must protect the people doing the work to protect them. The person mapping this architecture, building the field, and creating victim infrastructure is herself under attack. If you want others to be safe, you have to ensure that the person holding the line for them is not left alone in a kill box.

A direct call to lawyers, advocates, journalists, and academics

I know who reads my work: lawyers, advocates, journalists, professors, and researchers. I am publishing this to identify the gap that nearly killed me and to make it impossible for you to say you do not know it exists.

I am asking you, in your respective roles, to do what you can to help bridge it:

- If you are a lawyer, explore strategic litigation and emergency measures that can force real‑time protections for people being chemically suppressed and stalked, not just remedies years later.

- If you work in NGOs or international mechanisms, push for protocols that guarantee same‑day human contact, clear callback windows, and access to temporary safe housing for defenders reporting life‑threatening attacks.

- If you are a journalist, investigate the protection gap itself: cases where people were killed, disabled, or disappeared while waiting for “verification” or basic acknowledgment.

- If you are a professor or researcher, treat “no victim infrastructure” as a field problem and start designing architectures, legal, medical, social, and technical, that can respond as quickly and adaptively as the systems that are killing people now.

This is a dark period in our history: sophisticated suppression architectures have outpaced our laws, our protections, and our imaginations. The measure of whether it stays dark will be whether we build legislation, policies, and oversight now, while people like me are still alive to testify and to help design what comes next.

They picked the wrong person to come for. Short of death, I will map the architecture of this system, identify the guardrails needed to constrain and dismantle it, and work to ensure it can never again function in the shadows to harm civilians. I will create and advocate for the policies required to build the victim infrastructure that has nearly killed me and is killing others today, so that no one ever has to live or die inside this kind of vacuum again.

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