The National Human Rights Index for 2025 Published. It Has Not Decreased for the First Time in 7 Years

The National Human Rights Index for 2025 has been published. In this Index, experts compare Belarus with itself, tracking the state of the entire spectrum of human rights year after year.

For the first time in 7 years, the Index's assessment has not decreased compared to the previous year.

About the Index

The National Human Rights Index is an annual assessment of the human rights situation in Belarus. Since 2019, it has been prepared by a group of experts from Belarusian civil society under the general coordination of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee. More than 35 experts worked on the Index for 2025.

The Index contains an overall assessment of the situation, as well as a breakdown by three categories: social and economic rights, civil and political rights, and general human rights measures. Specific rights, their components, and indicators of compliance with an ideal situation are assessed. The assessment is based on 290 quantitative indicators on a 10-point scale, accompanied by expert comments.

The Index has three goals:

• to provide interested specialists with the opportunity to quickly assess the general human rights situation in Belarus, without gathering information from disparate sources;
• to show how the situation changes from year to year;
• to outline directions for human rights reforms that the country needs.

In 2024, the Index was noted in the Annual Report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as an important tool for assessing the compliance of national legislation, policies, and practices with international human rights standards.

Results for 2025

The overall index in 2025 was 2.4 out of 10 – unchanged compared to 2024.

For the first time in 7 years, the Index's assessment has not decreased compared to the previous year: in 2019–2020, the Index lost 1 point each, in 2021 – 0.4 points, in 2022 – 0.2 points, and in 2023 and 2024 – 0.1 points each.

However, this does not mean that the situation has stabilized. Rather, it indicates the effect of approaching the lower limit of the scale.

The number of indicators at an absolute minimum (1 point out of 10) has increased almost sixfold – from 6 in 2019 to 37 in 2025.

Expert comments indicate a deepening of repressive practices and a narrowing of space for the realization of even basic rights.

Assessments of five rights have decreased:

• right to life;
• right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion;
• right to education;
• right to social security;
• right to participate in cultural life.

The largest drop in 2025 was recorded in the sphere of cultural rights: the indicator of non-discriminatory access to cultural life lost 0.5 points – this is the largest single decrease across the entire Index. The assessment of the right to education decreased uniformly across all five of its components – this is not a localized failure, but a systemic erosion.

The remaining assessments of rights formally remained unchanged, however, within these rights, 98 out of 290 indicators worsened. At the same time, due to the calculation of the average value, the final assessment of a right may remain the same, even if a third of its components have deteriorated.

Point-by-point improvements in individual indicators are recorded annually – from 3 to 15.

In 2025, there were five, including the expansion of HPV vaccination and new measures to protect the right to work for people with disabilities. However, none of these improvements were sufficient to change the final assessment of the corresponding right.

Some violations affect not one, but several rights at once. Thus, the forced expulsion abroad of pardoned political prisoners in 2025 simultaneously worsened indicators for the right to life, the right not to be subjected to torture, the right to liberty and personal security, the right to a fair trial, and the right to participate in cultural life.

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