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Masthead— 4 sections · ~12 min read
Political Prisoner Watch is a non-partisan, English-language registry that aggregates, structures, and preserves cases of politically motivated prosecution — built for journalists, researchers, attorneys, and the public.
01Mission§ 01.1 – § 01.4
Our mission
Political Prisoner Watch documents and makes accessible cases of political imprisonment in Russia, Belarus, and Central Asia. We aggregate publicly available case records from established human rights organizations — including Memorial, OVD-Info, and Viasna — translate them into English, and structure them for use by journalists, researchers, attorneys, and the public.
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 distinguish between prisoners of conscience and individuals subject to politically motivated prosecution, and we credit our primary sources on every case page.
“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.”
Framework
PACE Res. 1900
Inclusion criteria
02The team
The leadership
Political Prisoner Watch is a non-partisan, English-language registry that aggregates, structures, and preserves cases of politically motivated prosecution — built for journalists, researchers, attorneys, and the public.
01Founder and oversight
Steve Swerdlow
Steve Swerdlow, Esq. serves as Founder and Oversight of Political Prisoner Watch. He 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.
02Founder and developer
Kenan Korn
Kenan founded Political Prisoner Watch in 2025 and runs the platform's research, engineering, and operations. He holds a BA in Political Science and holds 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.
03Researcher
Shiza Khan
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."
03Coverage
What we cover —
and what we don't.
…
Cases on record
Across — primary jurisdictions, updated continuously from upstream sources.
…
Active jurisdictions
Russia · Belarus · Kazakhstan, with selected cases from neighbouring states.
§ 03.1 · What we coverIn scope
Currently: documented cases in Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan,
with selected cases from other Central Asian states. All entries are sourced from established human rights organizations and structured with original-source attribution.
§ 03.2 · What we do not doOut of scope
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.
03.3Where we're going
We plan to expand coverage to additional jurisdictions where political imprisonment is systematically documented by credible human rights organizations. Near-term priorities include broader Central Asian coverage, Belarus expansion, and integration of additional Russian-language data sources. Longer-term, we are interested in serving researchers and attorneys working on cases beyond the post-Soviet space.
04Platform infrastructure§ 04.1 – § 04.3
Platform infrastructure
The underlying technology, utility framework, and evolutionary history of Political Prisoner Watch.
HUMAN OVERSIGHTEvery model output is designed to augment human analysis, not replace it.
XGBOOST
Core classifiers
Predicts the probability of torture and high-urgency status based on demographic data, charge codes, and detention venue.
Module 04.1.AV 2.4
LIGHTGBM
Surveillance attribution
Identifies cases involving specific facial recognition tools or digital wiretaps to track the deployment of surveillance technology.
Module 04.1.BV 1.8
PROPHET
Trend forecasting
Performs time-series 90-day forecasting on arrest rates, helping organizations preemptively allocate response resources.
Module 04.1.CV 3.0
Transparent by design
Every prediction is backed by rigorous data science. We publish our full technical methodology, model performance metrics, and dataset constraints.