The number of BBC World Service journalists working in exile is estimated to have almost doubled to 310 as of 2020.
The figures, released for the first time ahead of World Press Freedom Day, reflect its suppression in Russia, Afghanistan and Ethiopia.
Journalists from other countries, including Iran, have been living abroad for more than a decade.
Many face prison sentences, death threats and harassment, both online and offline.
"The only way for them to continue reporting is to force them to leave their homes," says BBC World Service director Lillian Landor.
"The increase in the number of journalists in exile that we are witnessing is extremely worrying for media freedom."
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When the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in August 2021, the BBC pulled most of its newsroom out of the country.
Female staff were no longer allowed to work, while their male colleagues faced threats.
Myanmar and Ethiopia have also experienced increased pressure on journalists, preventing them from reporting freely.
"I'm watching my back," says the BBC's Farsi correspondent, Jiyar Gol.
Now, whenever he enters a room, he immediately looks for an escape route in advance.
“We have a lot of security cameras in the house. I was warned that it would be wise to enroll my daughter in another school."
Dzhiyar has not been to Iran since 2007.
When his mother died, he could not go to her funeral, but secretly crossed the border to visit her grave.
But since his wife died of cancer four years ago, he has become more cautious.
"If something happened to me, what would happen to my daughter? It's something that's in the back of my mind all the time," he says.
"The Iranian regime has strengthened itself. He is under strict sanctions, he doesn't care what the international community thinks about him because he is isolated."
Jody Ginsberg from the Committee to Protect Journalists says that in the past three years, the number of journalists in exile, to whom the committee offers financial and legal assistance, has jumped 225 percent.
"We have almost a record number of journalists in prison, the killing of journalists has reached a peak not seen since 2015," she adds.
Regimes - such as Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia - are becoming increasingly desperate to control the narrative inside and outside their countries, she says.
BBC Russian's Nina Nazaraova left home after the full invasion of Ukraine.
As her plane took off from Moscow, she looked at her husband, also a journalist, and realized he was crying.
"I just took it out," she says.
It was March 4, 2022, the day Russia's new censorship law came into effect.
"I call a war a war," she says.
"And I could easily end up in jail for that."
They packed their 16-month-old son, two suitcases and a stroller, and bought the cheapest plane ticket they could find from Russia to Turkey.
After a week there, they had a surreal week in Dubai, on a vacation they had planned and paid for long before the war.
They then moved to Montenegro and then to the Latvian capital Riga, where the BBC opened an office for Russian staff in exile.
In April of this year, Nina's colleague, BBC correspondent in Russian Ilya Barabanov, was declared a "foreign agent" on charges of "spreading false information" and opposing the war.
He and the BBC reject it and are challenging it in court.
Threats to journalists can continue long after they leave.
In March, the anchor of the independent broadcaster Iran International was stabbed in the leg outside his London home, and recently British counter-terrorism police warned of an increase in threats against BBC Persian-language staff living in the UK.
In 2022, Rani Rahimpur, the presenter of the BBC in Persian, had her car robbed, and she suspects that a bug was installed in it.
The conversation she had with her mother was recorded and published on a platform run by the Iranian government.
It was edited to make it sound like she was supporting the regime.
When rival networks used the interview to discredit her, Rana decided to take a break from journalism.
"The regime is becoming more sophisticated in tactics," says Rana.
"What happened to me is just one of the many ways they try to discredit us, intimidate us and, ultimately, silence us."
This put her friends and colleagues on edge.
"Every time I call my mother in Iran, I know someone is eavesdropping," says Farnaz Gazizadeh, another presenter for the BBC in Persian.
"It's scary, because you know they can find a way to destroy you."
She has not returned to Iran for 21 years and recently discovered that she and nine of her colleagues had been sentenced in absentia to a year in prison.
They found out about it after hackers published information from the Iranian judiciary.
Earlier, Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused BBC Persian staff of inciting violence, hate speech and human rights violations.
Farnaz and her husband left with their six-month-old son after her husband ended up in jail for 25 days for writing a blog.
At home, her father was regularly visited by Iranian security services and threatened him, forcing him to call his daughter back and telling him to know where his grandchildren go to school.
In 2022, Farnaza's brother became seriously ill, and her elderly parents had trouble caring for him.
Six weeks later, her brother died. Within six months, her father also died.
"I never fully recovered from that," she says.
"I really wanted to meet my family, my mother, but I couldn't."
For the BBC's Shazia Haya in Pashtun, life in exile is also tinged with guilt.
She was evacuated to the UK alone in 2022 when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, leaving her parents and brother in Kabul.
"On the night when I left the house around 02:00 in the morning, I don't know why but I couldn't hug my younger brother. And now I regret it very much," she says.
"I'm free here and they're in some kind of prison."
She worries that the Taliban will punish them for her work, so she advises the family to deny it if anyone asks if they are related to her.
And then there's the unrelenting harassment online.
"I don't even read those messages anymore, those death threats," says Farnaz.
"Sometimes they are sexual in nature and can get very ugly."
One World Service journalist, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of angering leaders in his home country, says the biggest fear he and his colleagues have is that he will be left without a state if his government refuses to renew his passport.
What is harder for many of these journalists than the threats is that they have to report on their native country from afar.
Shazia used to travel around Afghanistan talking to people, especially women, about their lives.
Now he has to win their trust on the other end of the broken phone line.
In Afghanistan and Iran, ordinary people face threats if they agree to speak to the BBC.
Nina also says that her work has become more difficult.
She worries that if she remains chained to her desk, she will lose her most important skill, getting people to tell her things they don't want to tell anyone else.
And she misses the mundane things - like family gatherings where everyone raves about her little boy.
"The love is still there, it's just far away," she says.
Living and working in exile is a kind of half-life, explains Farnaz.
"You can't really live life thinking, 'I'm British now because I live in this country.' It doesn't work like that," she says.
"You are in exile, but you are still there."
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