The registry is the record. This is the argument.
Everything here stands on the same case database, and you can always tell how a claim was made: written by a person, or computed by the database itself. Three sections — pick your entry point.
The narrative layer the numbers can't carry — reporting, interviews, explainers, and case stories, written and reviewed by people and anchored in the case data.
Single, citable claims — a new law, a shifting charge, a crackdown's target — recomputed from the database on every page load, with the documented cases listed underneath.
The price of a donation
Through 2022, almost no one in our database was jailed over money. Then, in one legal system after another, prosecutors converged on the same discovery — a bank transfer is the easiest crime in the world to prove. Belarus prices a donation at a median five years. Russia prices it at twelve, and calls it treason.
The privacy penalty
Cases built on a public act — a post, a protest — end in a median five-year sentence. Cases built on what the state extracted from private space — intercepted chats, informant testimony, the contents of a phone — run seven, eight, ten. The deeper the reach, the longer the sentence.
What the torture is for
Russia and Belarus both torture political detainees — but not in the same place, and not for the same reason. In Belarus the documented violence sits at the point of capture: the protest, the border. In Russia it happens after the door closes, and it clusters in exactly the cases where the file must be produced out of the suspect himself — a phone PIN, a signed confession, an agreement to inform.
A law against posting
In March 2022 Russia created two crimes that did not exist before the invasion. Almost everyone documented under them was prosecuted for online speech.
The treason conveyor
Treason was Russia's rarest political charge — two documented arrests in 2019. Since the invasion it has become an assembly line: dozens of ordinary people a year, drawing the longest sentences in our database for donations, messages and photographs.
The extremism machine
Belarus rewrote how it jails dissenters without writing new laws. In 2020 almost no one was charged as an “extremist.” By 2025, three in four documented arrests were — a wholesale shift from public-order charges to national-security law.
The sentence lottery
Same charge, same year, different judge — a different life. Across documented Belarusian political cases, identically charged defendants drew sentences years apart depending on which judge heard the case. When we reshuffled judges at random five hundred times, a spread this large never appeared once.
Jailed for words, not the street
Women are a small share of Belarus’s documented political prisoners — but those who are jailed are overwhelmingly prosecuted for journalism and online speech, and almost never for street protest.
A prison population built in two protests
Before 2024, Georgia had almost no documented political prisoners. Nearly everyone in our database was arrested since — and two-thirds of them in just two months, each following a protest the government moved to crush.
Two waves, two generations
Georgia's December 2024 crackdown filled the jails with twenty-somethings from the barricades. The October 2025 wave came for their parents' generation — party leaders, teachers, a 71-year-old opera star. Same state, same crackdown, a different target.
Jailed for the square, not the screen
In Russia and Belarus, political prisoners are jailed for what they post. Kazakhstan is the mirror image: where the case is documented, it rests on being there — in the street, at the protest — and the sentences run for years.
The same database that powers the findings is open to your own questions — cross-tabulate any two dimensions, assemble country-conditions evidence, or let the detection engine surface what's worth writing about.
Any two dimensions, cross-tabulated — with the cases behind every cell.
Country-conditions evidence, matched to your client's fact pattern.
Ranked leads from the data — trend shifts, outliers, crackdown surges.
Everything on this page sits on the same foundation: the case database, built from the documentation of Viasna, Memorial, OVD-Info, CPJ, and regional monitors. Follow any finding to its receipts and you reach named people, their charges, and the primary source that documented them — that's the standard, for the computed layer and the written one alike.