On 30 October 1974, prisoners in the Soviet camps of Mordovia and Perm declared hunger strikes to mark the first “Day of the Political Prisoner in the USSR,” an initiative credited to Kronid Lyubarsky and Alexei Murzhenko. Jailed for words, they answered with their bodies. Russia began officially remembering the victims of Soviet repression in 1991. Fifty-two years on, rights groups and US congressional resolutions mark 30 October as the International Day of Political Prisoners. Those resolutions estimate one million people are imprisoned worldwide for their beliefs, speech, or politics.
The law leaves no room for doubt. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects “freedom to hold opinions without interference,” and Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights allows restrictions only when they are provided by law and necessary. Article 9 of the Declaration bars “arbitrary arrest, detention or exile,” and Article 14 of the Covenant guarantees a fair trial.
As Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison, put it: “To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.”
The numbers show where that promise has collapsed.
Myanmar holds roughly 15,000 political prisoners out of more than 32,000 arrested since the 2021 coup, according to the AAPP, which counts 8,621 killed by the junta. On 1 October, 13 prisoners were seized at Sittwe Prison as they were being released, and within four days they were sentenced to another ten years under the Counter-Terrorism Law.
In Russia, Memorial counted 1,217 political prisoners at the end of 2025, up from 805 a year earlier, while OVD-Info, which tracks 2,366 people jailed for political reasons, was declared “extremist” on 4 June.
Belarus held 876 at the end of September, with 4,815 recognized since 2020. Viasna recognized 25 new political prisoners in September while 13 were pardoned: a revolving door. Venezuela’s count has fallen to 322 from over 800 before January, through amnesty, not courts.
India, the world’s largest democracy, shows the exception working inside one. The Public Safety Act permits detention for up to two years without trial, and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act permits prolonged detention without charge on broad terrorism definitions, according to the Civicus Monitor. In Kashmir, The Wire counts more than 2,300 arrests under the UAPA between 2019 and 2021 alone, and Kashmir Media Service puts today’s political detainees above 3,000. Yasin Malik is serving a life sentence. Human rights defender Khurram Parvez spent 1,703 days in jail from November 2021 before being granted bail on 22 July 2026, after a UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention opinion had found his detention arbitrary, and journalist Irfan Mehraj spent 1,219 days.
In Delhi, Umar Khalid has been held since 2020, and the Supreme Court rejected his bail plea on 5 January 2026. When a case takes years, the process itself becomes the punishment. India rejected this month’s OIC references to Kashmir as “malicious,” but rejection is no answer to a detention record documented by UN experts and international rights groups.
Pakistan sits in the uncomfortable middle. Freedom House scores it 32/100, “Partly Free,” with internet freedom at 27/100, “Not Free.” The World Justice Project ranks it 130th of 143 on the rule of law, and Reporters Without Borders places it 153rd of 180 on press freedom. None of this is a verdict on intent. The country faces real militant violence, and Pakistan’s Foreign Office says attacks from Afghan soil caused more than 3,500 casualties this year. Fifty-two years after Soviet prisoners marked the first Day of the Political Prisoner, arbitrary detention and the criminalisation of dissent remain global concerns. The question is how the tools built for that threat are used. The amended Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act made “false and fake information” a criminal offence, and Human Rights Watch counted some 689 cases under it between January and August 2025, many involving journalists. The state’s own Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances received 273 new cases in 2025, and traced 32 missing people to prisons and 13 to internment centres.
At the other end sit the countries with the strongest checks on power.
Denmark, Norway and Finland top the World Justice Project’s 2025 Rule of Law Index at 0.90, 0.89 and 0.87. Finland alone scores 100/100 on Freedom House’s 2026 ranking, with New Zealand, Norway and Sweden at 99. Venezuela ranks last, 143rd of 143. The pairing is no coincidence: where courts, free press and an opposition can constrain the executive, jailing critics is costly, and where they cannot, it becomes policy. The trend runs against everyone. Freedom House recorded a 20th straight year of decline, and the WJP found the rule of law fell in 68% of countries in 2025.
Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” explains how. Emergency powers, meant as temporary suspensions of law, harden into a permanent technique of government. Prosecuting a label instead of a crime, whether “terrorist,” “extremist,” or “foreign agent,” lets a state detain without ordinary safeguards. Myanmar’s re-arrests of freed prisoners and Russia’s extremist designations show the exception turning routine, and the pattern holds across the data: a label, an exceptional law, detention before trial, and fresh charges at the prison gate. It is not confined to autocracies.
Three tests cut through the labels: was the arrest lawful, was the trial fair, and was the speech protected? Where the answer is no, a prisoner of conscience is not a security problem but a verdict on the jailer. In 1974, the prisoners of Mordovia had only hunger to give. Today the world has the law, the data and the names. What is missing is the will.
Read more: https://digdebate.com/reel/muzzammil-ayyub-thakur-at-unhrc-how-many-more-kashmiris-must-die-in-detention/
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