Our project tells every day about the ever-worsening situation with political repression in Russia and the occupied territories of Ukraine. At the same time, we believe it is important to remember that the issue of Russian political prisoners is part of a global problem. Authoritarian regimes that use quasi-judicial mechanisms to repress dissenters exist in dozens of countries around the world right now.
The existence of repression on political and religious grounds can be spoken of with certainty since the first written sources. For thousands of years, they were considered a normal phenomenon or at least an internal affair of this or that state. This began to change in the nineteenth century with the emergence of what would later be called campaigns of solidarity with political prisoners. The struggle for the release of the French officer of Jewish origin Alfred Dreyfus and the activities of the Societies of Friends of Russian Freedom in Great Britain and the United States, which, among other things, opposed the extradition of those accused of political offences to the Russian Empire, are vivid examples of such campaigns at the intersection of the 19th and 20th centuries.
In the 20th century, interest in releasing political prisoners gradually grew. In the 1920s and 1930s, interest in political repression in authoritarian states and solidarity with its victims became a permanent factor in international politics. Solidarity campaigns with the defendants of the SR trial, the Reichstag arson case, victims of racial discrimination in the southern states of the United States, and Catholic believers in Mexico became an example of not only mass but also successful solidarity with political prisoners, demonstrating the power of public opinion, which in some cases even the most repressive regimes could not ignore.
After the Second World War, the trials of war criminals, the creation of the UN and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the movement demanding the release of political prisoners in left-wing and right-wing dictatorships grew every year. The issue of respect for human rights gradually became one of the main factors that politicians from democratic states had to take into account in their relations with authoritarian regimes. Moreover, the gradual liberalisation of some of them in the 1950s, such as the USSR and other Eastern European countries of the socialist camp or ideologically opposed Spain, did not lead to a decline in interest in the fate of political prisoners in these countries.
Thus, the emergence of Amnesty International and the concept of ‘prisoner of conscience’ in 1961 was connected with the case of Portuguese students sentenced to 7 years in prison for raising a toast ‘For Freedom!’. This was followed by the emergence of other international human rights organisations that fought for the release of political prisoners both in the pro-Western dictatorships of Southern Europe, Latin America and South Africa, as well as in the USSR and Eastern Bloc countries, and in numerous Third World states that had not joined any pole.
The human rights movement of the USSR also joined the struggle for the release of political prisoners not only in its own country but also on a global scale. The Soviet branch of Amnesty International both collected information about the victims of political persecution in the USSR and spoke in favour of such victims abroad. The eminent scientist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov also constantly demanded human rights in various countries, speaking out in favour of victims of military conflicts, refugees and, of course, political prisoners.
The collapse of the USSR in 1991, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact Organisation, and the transition of many one-party communist and anti-communist dictatorships to democracy in the 1980s and early 1990s gave hope that the notion of the ‘political prisoner’ would gradually fade into history. The symbol of this hope was the release of anti-apartheid fighter Nelson Mandela in South Africa after 27 years in prison.
Unfortunately, practice has shown that the struggle for the release of political prisoners has continued to be relevant. In many newly independent states – Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and later in Russia and Belarus – the scale of political repression after 1991 became comparable to, or even significantly exceeded, that of the late Soviet Union. The human rights situation in the Middle East, Africa, and a number of countries in East and South-East Asia improved only slightly. They deteriorated sharply with the beginning of the democratic backlash in the mid-2000s. The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to political prisoners such as Liu Xiaobo, Ales Bialiatski and Nargiz Mohammadi was an indirect recognition of the importance of this trend.
An institutional development of international solidarity was the adoption of PACE Resolution 1900 (2012), which, based on the work of experts assessing the situation in Namibia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, formulated criteria for distinguishing political prisoners from the general mass of those deprived of liberty. In 2013, a group of human rights defenders from Azerbaijan,
The institutional development of international solidarity was the adoption of PACE Resolution 1900 (2012), which, based on the work of experts assessing the situation in Namibia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, formulated criteria for distinguishing political prisoners from the general mass of those deprived of liberty. In 2013, a group of human rights defenders from Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, including representatives of Memorial, compiled a ‘Guide to the Definition of a Political Prisoner’ based on this resolution. It is this Guide that our project, the Human Rights Centre ‘Viasna’ and some other organisations are applying.
On 28 October 2022, US Congressmen Steve Cohen, also Special Representative on Political Prisoners of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, and Joe Wilson of the US Helsinki Commission, introduced a draft resolution to declare 30 October as International Day of Political Prisoners. It condemned regimes engaged in the ‘systematic suppression of independent voices, including but not limited to the governments of Russia and Belarus.’
The draft specified that the date was chosen because on 30 October 1974, ‘Soviet human rights activists and dissidents came up with the idea of celebrating a day of political prisoners in the USSR and went on hunger strike while in prison on that day.’ Despite the fact that this draft was not considered by the US House of Representatives, it became an important reminder of the fate of political prisoners around the world. It should be noted that the document also contained a quantitative estimate of the scale of repression in the world – at least 1 million political prisoners persecuted for their commitment to democracy and participation in protests.