A political prisoner is someone imprisoned for their political activity. The political offense is not always the official reason for the prisoner's detention.
Re-education through labor, abbreviated laojiao was a system of administrative detention on mainland China. Active from 1957 to 2013, the system was used to detain persons who were accused of committing minor crimes such as petty theft, prostitution, and trafficking of illegal drugs, as well as political dissidents, petitioners, and Falun Gong followers. It was separated from the much larger laogai system of prison labor camps.
Human rights violations in Russia have routinely been criticized by international organizations and independent domestic media outlets. Some of the most commonly cited violations include deaths in custody, the widespread and systematic use of torture by security forces and prison guards, hazing rituals in the Russian Army, widespread violations of children's rights, violence and discrimination against ethnic minorities, and the killing of journalists.
Harry Wu was a Chinese-American human rights activist. Wu spent 19 years in Chinese labor camps, and he became a resident and citizen of the United States. In 1992, he founded the Laogai Research Foundation.
The human rights record of North Korea is often considered to be the worst in the world and has been globally condemned, with the United Nations, the European Union and groups such as Human Rights Watch all critical of it. Most international human rights organizations consider North Korea to have no contemporary parallel with respect to violations of liberty.
In military terminology, a black site is a location at which an unacknowledged black operation or black project is conducted. A 2021 Associated Press news story defined black sites as "clandestine jails where prisoners generally are not charged with a crime and have no legal recourse, with no bail or court order."
Administrative detention is arrest and detention of individuals by the state without trial. A number of jurisdictions claim that it is done for security reasons. Many countries claim to use administrative detention as a means to combat terrorism or rebellion, to control illegal immigration, or to otherwise protect the ruling regime.
Human rights violations were committed by the warring sides during the second war in Chechnya. Both Russian officials and Chechen rebels have been regularly and repeatedly accused of committing war crimes including kidnapping, torture, murder, hostage taking, looting, rape, decapitation, and assorted other breaches of the law of war. International and humanitarian organizations, including the Council of Europe and Amnesty International, have criticized both sides of the conflict for blatant and sustained violations of international humanitarian law.
Freedom of assembly in Russia is granted by Article 31 of the Constitution adopted in 1993, where it states that citizens of the Russian Federation shall have the right to gather peacefully, without weapons, and to hold meetings, rallies, demonstrations, marches and pickets. In practice, the right to freedom of assembly is restricted by Russian authorities. According to a Russian law introduced in 2014, a fine or detention of up to 15 days may be given for holding a demonstration without the permission of authorities and prison sentences of up to five years may be given for three breaches. Single-person pickets have resulted in fines and a three-year prison sentence.
The Other Russia of E. V. Limonov, formerly The Other Russia, is an unregistered National Bolshevik political party in Russia, founded on 10 July 2010 by Eduard Limonov. The Other Russia was reorganized in September 2020 and changed its name to "The Other Russia of E. V. Limonov", in honor of their deceased founder who had died the same year. As a Russian political party adopting syncretic politics, it has been variously called far-left and far-right by the likes of Malaysia's The Sun, France's Le Point, RTBF, and BFM TV, and Eurasia Daily Monitor and the Czech Republic's Expactz.cz, respectively.
Chernokozovo detention center is a prison in the village of Chernokozovo, Chechnya, Russia. The detention center is operated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and currently has the status of penal colony.
Filtration camps or filtration points were used by the Russian federal forces for their mass internment centers during the First Chechen Wars in 1994–1996 and then again during the Second Chechen War between 1999 and 2003.
The Bolotnaya Square case is a criminal case by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation on account of alleged mass riots and alleged violence against the police during the "March of the Millions" on May 6, 2012 on the Bolotnaya Square in Moscow. The demonstration was one of the biggest protests in Russia since the 1990s. By the number of accused, 37 persons, it is currently the largest criminal case against participants of public demonstrations in modern Russia.
Oleg Gennadyevich Sentsov is a Ukrainian filmmaker, writer and activist from Crimea. Sentsov has directed the feature films Gamer (2011), Numbers, and Rhino (2021).
Oleksandr Oleksandrovych Kolchenko is a Ukrainian left-wing and trade union activist, antifascist, anarchist, ecologist, and archaeologist, who was convicted of terrorism by the Russian administration of Crimea in 2014.
Ivan Yuryevich Pavlov is a Russian advocate and open government activist. He participated in the development of Russian federal and regional freedom of information legislation. He specializes in protecting the right to access government information in Russia, and defending citizens from ungrounded accusations of disclosing state secrets, high treason, and espionage. Additionally, he focuses on raising public awareness of the need for modern legislation on state secrets and the use of current legislation as a means of repression.
Zarema Bagavutdinova was a member of a Dagestan regional human rights group, "Pravozashchita" or "Human Rights Defense." She was imprisoned in July 2013 on charges of recruiting on behalf of an armed Islamic insurgency in the region of Dagestan. She was sentenced to five years of incarceration.
The 2010 Manezhnaya Square riot trials resulted in verdicts against Igor Berezyuk, Kirill Unchuk and Ruslan Khubaev for violent clashes in Moscow. Each was a member of The Other Russia party, and found guilty on charges such as inciting hatred and organizing the December 11, 2010 Manezhnaya Square riots. Berezyuk was also charged with assaulting a police officer. Human rights groups have argued that the three are political prisoners, and that their imprisonment is chiefly the result of their involvement in the unregistered Russian opposition party, Other Russia.
The TsNIIMash-Export espionage trial concerned five Russian scientists accused of selling Russian military technology to Chinese spies. The scientists, Igor Reshetin, Sergei Vizir, Mikhail Ivanov, Sergei Tverdokhlebov, and Alexander Rozhkin, all worked for the Russian rocket and space researcher TsNIIMash-Export. Human rights groups have criticized Russia's handling of the case, and some have called the scientists political prisoners.
