And so it is entirely appropriate that Freedom House, the venerable human rights advocacy organization, has named its campaign to help political prisoners and hold authoritarian regimes accountable in Mr. Hiatt’s honor. Free Them All: The Fred Hiatt Program to Free Political Prisoners will work by raising public awareness of political detainees, by assisting discreet legal efforts on their behalf and by aiding their families. We are proud, and grateful, for this testament to our late colleague.
We only wish it were less necessary. And yet the data shows that the world’s political detention cells remain full. In Cuba, hundreds are still behind bars on charges related to their participation in the national protest that swept the island on July 11, 2021, according to the monitors Justica 11J and Cubalex. Belarus, which had almost no political prisoners a few years ago, now holds at least 1,483, according to the human rights group Viasna. Hong Kong, where China’s Communist authorities are imposing their authoritarian paradigm on a former British colony, holds 1,763, says the Hong Kong Democracy Council.
In Myanmar, the military junta, which overthrew a nascent democracy in 2021, holds 19,803, reports the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a Myanmar group. China has some 7,520 people “under coercive measures,” according to the Dui Hua Foundation, for reasons including dissent, religious belief and being an ethnic minority. The political prisoner database of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China, using somewhat different criteria, reports 2,615 cases of “active detention” but notes the actual totals are considerably greater.
Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua and Venezuela also hold political prisoners, though in Venezuela the Biden administration recently succeeded in negotiating liberty for some 20 detainees and Roberto Abdul, an opposition leader. There were 246 political prisoners in Venezuela as of August 2022, according to Foro Penal (Criminal Forum), a nongovernmental organization.
Russia has detained 19,747 antiwar protesters (often temporarily) and opened 849 criminal cases against antiwar dissent since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to the monitoring group OVD-Info. Ilya Yashin, 39, a democracy activist in Russia, was sentenced on Dec. 9, 2022, to 8½ years in prison for criticizing the Russian military’s rampage in Bucha, Ukraine. He was recently thrown into solitary confinement and described the miserable cell on his Telegram channel. “Very crowded,” he said. “You feel literally walled up in a stone cell, three by four meters. From 5 a.m. to 9 p.m., the bunk is fastened to the wall, and it is prohibited to lie down, even on the floor, during the day. You can only sit on a stool and walk three meters back and forth. It is cold, you cannot take a sweater or jacket into the cell. There is only cold water from the tap. A kettle is forbidden. The plumbing is rusting out, there is a constant smell of sewage.
“An impudent rat, the size of an average cat, regularly enters the cell from the crack behind the toilet. … The exercise yard is even smaller than the cell: 2.5 by 3 meters. Instead of a ceiling, there is a grate, and snow underfoot. You can walk from six to seven in the morning.”
Two experts once listed the “wearing down process” of political prisoners: sleeplessness, including being forced to sleep on one’s back looking up at a lightbulb; keeping a prison cell cold and damp; undernourishment, so “food becomes an obsession”; and endless interrogations. These methods were described 67 years ago by Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski in their classic text, “Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy.” The methods remain in use today.
What’s different now is that dictatorships are modernizing. They are becoming expert at spotting dissent on social media, spreading disinformation online, squeezing out independent news media and dominating what people see and hear. They do it without bloodshed or tanks. Today, the pretext for arrest can be a stray word on Facebook or Telegram.
Each of these cases is an injustice. Each detainee deserves to be freed. With the help of the new effort named in Mr. Hiatt’s honor, we hope many of them will be.
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