A Global Vision
Political repression is not confined by borders. While our initial infrastructure was stress-tested against the complex legal apparatus of specific regimes like the Russian Federation, our architecture was built to scale universally.
We are actively expanding our scope across borders, integrating international case law, global sanctions data, and regional persecution metrics to create the world's first truly predictive, multi-national political prisoner watch system.
Indexing Injustice Worldwide
Expansion Infrastructure
The Team
Political PrisonerWatch is guided by a team of human rights experts, legal scholars, and technologists dedicated to documenting state repression.
Steve Swerdlow, Esq.
Oversight & Founder
Steve Swerdlow, Esq. serves as Oversight and Founder of Political Prisoner Watch. He is a human rights lawyer and Associate Professor of the Practice of Human Rights at the University of Southern California. An expert on the former Soviet region, he teaches international human rights law, research, and advocacy.
Previously, he served as Senior Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch from 2010 to 2019, where he led work on Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and founded the organization’s Kyrgyzstan field office. His extensive field experience includes missions to Azerbaijan, Moldova, Russia, and Kazakhstan. He also served as a legal officer for the International Organization for Migration and practiced law in San Francisco. He received his J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law and an M.A. in International Affairs from Columbia University.
Changelog
A transparent log of every major feature, expansion, and improvement shipped to the platform.
* We hope to expand our coverage to include more countries in the future. As we build and create new features, they will be showcased here.
A Tool For The Frontlines
Political PrisonerWatch isn't just a database. It's a fortified utility built specifically for those actively defending human rights in real-time.
For Advocates & Activists
Track systemic repression trends, monitor the rollout of surveillance technologies across different jurisdictions, and coordinate rapid response campaigns using our high-urgency categorization models.
For Lawyers & Legal Defenders
Instantly identify inflated charges, cross-reference prosecution templates across hundreds of similar cases, and use our automated AI tools to draft robust asylum and sanctions affidavits instantly.
For Journalists
Uncover hidden narratives. Use our semantic topic modeling to break stories on shifts in state prosecution tactics before they become mainstream news.
For Families & Loved Ones
Monitor case urgency, track prison transfers securely, and safely seek community and international awareness to apply strategic pressure on detention centers.
The Intelligence Engine
Under the hood, our standalone Python ML microservice runs continuous predictive pipelines, transforming raw court documents into actionable intelligence.
Core Classifiers
Predicts the probability of torture and high-urgency status based on demographic data, arrest circumstances, and charge severity.
Surveillance Attribution
Identifies cases involving specific facial recognition tools or digital wiretaps to track the spread of state surveillance tech.
Trend Forecasting
Performs time-series 90-day forecasting on arrest rates, helping organizations preemptively allocate legal and financial resources.
Topic Modeling
Extracts and clusters evolving narrative themes from thousands of prosecution summaries to reveal new angles of state attacks.
Inflation Detector
Flags cases where standard administrative charges are mathematically likely to be artificially inflated into severe criminal felonies.
Template Detection
Finds distinctly identical prosecution narratives reused across different courts, proving coordinated political targeting from the top.