Around the world, autocrats are detaining, prosecuting, and imprisoning legal and judicial professionals as part of a larger assault on the rule of law.
In January 2025, a Russian court sentenced Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin, and Aleksey Lipster to prison terms ranging from three and a half to five years.1 Officially accused of extremism, their real transgression was serving as legal counsel to the late political opposition leader and anticorruption activist Aleksey Navalny. The three lawyers, by attempting to provide a check on executive power and ensure due process rights for victims of repression, became targets for repression themselves.
There are countless people around the world for whom a lawyer or independent judge may be the last line of defense against political imprisonment. But according to Freedom House research,2 these crucial pillars of the rule of law are under attack in dozens of countries, threatening the basic legal order required for peace, security, and economic growth.
Navalny’s lawyers are representative of the many legal and judicial professionals around the globe who have faced retaliation from authoritarian governments for attempting to uphold due process and judicial independence. Such retribution may take the form of arbitrary dismissals, transfers to far-flung jurisdictions, reassignments to less prestigious prosecutorial departments, disbarment, or even political imprisonment. All of these tactics and individual cases feed into broader campaigns designed to weaken the rule of law and compel the justice system to serve the interests of autocratic rulers.3 The judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers who remain have a strong incentive to align themselves with the leadership, making conditions ripe for increased political imprisonment across the wider population.
Freedom House data show that judges, prosecutors, or lawyers in at least 78 countries—ranging from dictatorships to democracies—faced politicized detention, prosecution, or imprisonment between 2014 and 2024. Lawyers are most often affected, experiencing this type of persecution in at least 75 countries during the same period.
In countries where these groups are targeted on a large scale, the repression tends to coincide with two key political contexts: periods when the government’s grip on power is threatened by significant resistance, or when a new regime or leader has recently emerged.
Persecution to defend the status quo
Judges, prosecutors, and lawyers often encounter large-scale persecution during episodes of major resistance against the government, such as mass antigovernment demonstrations, attempts by autonomous state institutions to hold political leaders accountable, or armed insurgencies.
In Iran, at least 44 defense lawyers were arrested amid the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement, a series of protests sparked by the death of Jina Mahsa Amini while she was held in custody by the morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. Many of the lawyers who were arrested had represented detained protesters or expressed support for them.4 Following the 2021 military coup in Myanmar and the massive prodemocracy movement that erupted in response, dozens of lawyers were rounded up for representing anticoup protesters or for perceived opposition to the military junta. As of March 5, 2025, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners had documented the arrests of 68 legal representatives since the coup.5 The conversion of defense attorneys into political prisoners, combined with broader intimidation tactics against the legal profession, has caused the number of working lawyers in Myanmar to sharply decrease.6
