Belarus
Палітычныя зняволеныя ў Беларусі
1,282 documented cases
Belarus has held over a thousand political prisoners since the disputed August 2020 presidential election, when state security responded to mass protests with mass arrests. Charges most often invoked include Article 342 (organizing actions that grossly violate public order), Article 361 (calls against state security), and a growing list of 'extremism' designations applied to journalists, Telegram channels, and protest movements.
Political Prisoner Watch republishes case records maintained by Viasna Human Rights Centre — the country's leading documentation organization, whose own staff including Nobel Peace laureate Ales Bialiatski are themselves imprisoned. We translate cases to English, classify them by charge taxonomy, and surface them in the same database alongside Russia, Kazakhstan, and other monitored countries.
Primary sources: Viasna Human Rights Centre
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.
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.
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.
181 of 1,282 cases are not yet plotted on the map, typically because the public source did not record a precise location.
Figures reflect documented cases in this database · a lower bound, not an official total
