PREAMBLE I am a political scientist and in the course of my career as a lecturer and pro-democracy activist, I have traversed over 50 countries across different continents. Hence, I had taken the routine details of international travel for granted – until my traumatic experience in Malaysia where I was detained under extremely dehumanising conditions for eight days late last year (November 2017). My offence was that I failed to get a transit visa to go from one airport in the