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An independent, non-partisan registry of politically motivated prosecutions — built on the casework of frontline human-rights organizations, translated into English, structured into one database, and traceable, case by case, back to its sources.
The Detained documents cases of political imprisonment in Russia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia. The primary documentation comes from organizations that have done this work for decades — Political Prisoners Support. Memorial, OVD-Info, Viasna, CPJ, and regional monitors. We translate their case records into English, structure them into a single searchable database, and keep every entry pointed back at the organization that documented it.
Our inclusion criteria are grounded in international human rights law, drawing on the frameworks of PACE Resolution 1900, Memorial, Freedom House, and Freedom Now. We apply one centralized term — political prisoner — with clear, published definitions of how it applies in each country, and every case page credits the organization that documented it.
“We are an independent project. We do not duplicate the primary documentation work done by frontline organizations — we make their work more accessible to English-language audiences who would not otherwise encounter it.”
Political Prisoner Watch is now The Detained.
This platform began as a register of names. It did not stay one. As the database grew — the charges and the courts that impose them, the judges and prisons behind each sentence, the patterns that connect one arrest to hundreds — the platform outgrew its original name.
The new name is a claim about where every case starts. Before the charge, before the article of the criminal code, before the courtroom and the sentence, there is a door and a person on the wrong side of it. Detention is the one act every state performs; conviction is optional. Some regimes build the file and stage the trial. Others skip all of it and simply keep the person. We take the first fact — the one the state cannot deny, because it is the state doing it — and build the record from there.
The is deliberate. Not detention, the condition, but the detained: the people. Every entry here is a person with a name.
Nothing about the work changes. Every case file, citation, and link carries forward — politicalprisonerwatch.org addresses resolve here automatically — and our inclusion methodology remains anchored to the Council of Europe’s Resolution 1900 standard. The archive, the standard, the sources, and the team continue without interruption.
Every case in this registry begins the same way. Before the charge, before the article of the criminal code, before the courtroom and the sentence and the colony — there is a door, and a person on the wrong side of it.
Detention is the one act every state performs. Conviction is optional. Some regimes build the file, stage the trial, and produce the verdict; others skip all of it and simply keep the person. A man held nineteen years at Guantánamo without charge is not a defendant. A journalist in pre-trial detention for three years while the case is “under investigation” has not been convicted of anything. A man taken from a courthouse hallway by immigration officers and moved between facilities without a hearing has had no day in court to lose. The law recognizes these people only when it chooses to. The fact of their detention is not in dispute.
So we take the first fact — the one the state cannot deny, because it is the state doing it — and we build the record from there.
The is deliberate. Not detention, the condition; the detained, the people. Every entry here is a person with a name.
A note on the word. Inside the registry, detained also has a narrower, technical meaning: it is a case status, marking someone held before trial, as distinct from convicted, released, or in absentia. Both uses are correct and we have kept both. The status describes where a case stands today. The name describes what unites every case in it — that at some point, a state decided a person should not be free, and everything that followed flowed from that decision.
How we define political prisoner — the legal framework we apply and how it plays out country by country — is documented on its own page.
A small team of human-rights lawyers, regional researchers, and editors — holding every entry in the registry to the Resolution 1900 standard.
Steve Swerdlow, Esq. is a human rights lawyer and Associate Professor of the Practice of Human Rights at the University of Southern California. An expert on the former Soviet region, he teaches international human rights law, research, and advocacy.
Previously, he served as Senior Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch from 2010 to 2019, where he led work on Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and founded the organization's Kyrgyzstan field office. His extensive field experience includes missions to Azerbaijan, Moldova, Russia, and Kazakhstan. He received his J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law and an M.A. in International Affairs from Columbia University.
Kenan founded The Detained and runs the platform's research, engineering, and operations. He holds a BA in Political Science with a minor in Law and Technology from the University of Southern California, where he worked with Professor Swerdlow on Russian, Belarusian, and Central Asian prosecution patterns, and is an incoming MPhil candidate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.
His prior research has appeared in The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art, and he has conducted legal research on AI governance for a Magic Circle firm.
Olivia Batist holds a BA in International Relations from the University of Southern California, where she conducted field research with Professor Swerdlow in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan on political prisoners, constitutional law, election fraud, and political repression.
Her research focuses on human rights and democratic governance in the post-Soviet region, and she has contributed to expert witness research on political persecution and asylum claims. She is also a recipient of a litigation fellowship at a plaintiff-side civil litigation firm, where she contributes to case development and legal research in efforts to hold institutions accountable on behalf of victims.
Shiza Khan holds a BA in Political Science and a minor in Legal Studies from the University of Southern California. She has conducted field research with Professor Swerdlow in Georgia and Armenia on ethnic minorities and democratic backsliding.
She wrote her thesis on the historical persecution of Meskhetian Turks and contemporary displacement dynamics marked by mandatory conscription efforts by the Russian military, titled "A People of Perpetual Exile: Political, Economic, and Social Drivers of Meskhetian Turk Displacement."
Claire Krysler holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Southern California, with an emphasis in cross-national relations and human rights. During her studies she completed two field-based human rights courses across Georgia, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan.
At The Detained she works on the registry's data pipeline: processing incoming casework, verifying detention records against primary sources before publication, and monitoring the social-media channels where cases in her region often surface first. Her regional concentration is Kyrgyzstan.
Across — jurisdictions, refreshed continuously from the organizations that document them.
Russia · Belarus · Georgia · Kazakhstan, with cases from across Central Asia.
Documented cases in Russia, Belarus, Georgia, and Kazakhstan,
with cases from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan. Every entry names the organization that documented it and links to the original record.
We are not a primary documentation source. We do not conduct field investigations, interview families, or verify charges independently. We rely on the rigor of the organizations whose data we aggregate.
Coverage grows where credible documentation exists. Georgia entered the registry in 2025, when two protest crackdowns produced a political-prisoner population almost overnight. Near-term work is deeper Central Asian coverage and published findings for every country we document. Longer term, we want the registry and its findings to serve casework beyond the post-Soviet space — anywhere political imprisonment is systematically documented.
The methodology page sets out how cases enter the database, how the models are trained and evaluated, and where the data is thin. If a number on this site cannot be traced to its cases, that is a bug — tell us.
