The Viasna Human Rights Centerjoins Political Prisoner Watch.

The Viasna Human Rights Center is the largest non-governmental human-rights organisation in Belarus. It was founded in 1996 in response to the repression against Belarusians participating in peaceful protests. For thirty years, Viasna's human-rights defenders have worked to protect fundamental human rights and freedoms, collect and publish information about violations, engage in international advocacy, document torture and other forms of inhuman treatment, campaign for free elections and against the death penalty, and conduct educational and awareness-raising activities.

Several members of the organisation have been imprisoned for their peaceful human-rights work — including Viasna's chairperson, Ales Bialiatski, who was personally awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. Beginning in 2021, Viasna's defenders started leaving Belarus to avoid persecution — first before the leadership was imprisoned, then in the wake of the July 2021 detentions of Ales Bialiatski and several colleagues. By the time the Lukashenka regime designated Viasna an “extremist formation” in 2023, most of the team was already in exile. Nevertheless, Viasna's defenders continue their work for the benefit of Belarusians both inside and outside the country.

Viasna, together with other Belarusian human-rights organisations, initiates and participates in the process of recognising people imprisoned for political reasons as political prisoners — in accordance with the Guidelines on the Definition of “Political Prisoner,” adopted by the Belarusian human-rights community. Viasna collects and analyses information and prepares justifications so that everyone who is unfairly imprisoned is noticed, recognised, and supported.

1. 01
   List of political prisoners in Belarus

   The canonical, continuously-updated register of currently-imprisoned individuals recognised as political prisoners under the Belarusian human-rights community's guidelines.
2. 02
   People convicted for political reasons

   A broader register including those sentenced for political activity whose detention or sentence has ended but whose convictions remain on the record.
3. 03
   All known defendants in criminal cases

   The comprehensive record of every individual known to be facing politically-motivated criminal proceedings, used as the working dataset for advocacy.
4. 04
   Former political prisoners

   Search and verification work to add released individuals to the “former political prisoners” record for transitional-justice and reparations work.

Under this partnership, Viasna's case data flows into the Political Prisoner Watch registry alongside our other Belarusian sources. Every record drawn from Viasna's casework is published in PPW with full attribution, a clickable citation back to the source page at prisoners.spring96.org/en#list, and a shared editorial standard for evidence and verification. Cases recognised by Viasna under the Belarusian human-rights community's political-prisoner guidelines retain that recognition in PPW's search, analytics, and asylum tooling.

For journalists, lawyers, and researchers using PPW, this means: Viasna's thirty years of meticulous on-the-ground monitoring are now first-class data in our cross-country comparisons, our judicial-fingerprint analytics, and our asylum case-builder.