Judicial Statistics Gathered by Russian Supreme Court to Remain Classified for 20 Years

Paul Goble

              Staunton, May 12 – In what the Meduza news agency describes as “a catastrophe,” the Judicial Department of the Russian Supreme Court has declared that all judicial statistics it had released in the past will now remain classified for 20 years and all the data it had released since 2005 has been taken down from its website.

              There are more than 2,000 courts in Russia, and individually, they will continue to release information on their decisions; but the Judicial Department of the Supreme Court is the only body that gathers them and had released that data in the past (meduza.io/feature/2026/05/12/v-rossii-zakryli-dostup-sudebnoy-statistike-za-20-let-i-eto-katastrofa).

              Because there are so many courts, no individual or organization other than the department of the Supreme Court is capable of gathering it all together and then using it to track trends like treatment of dissidents, LGBT+ people, deaths in the military, and so on. This decision will thus prevent anyone from having comprehensive data on such issues.

              And because that is so, this decision is far more serious than most of the other cutbacks in statistics that the Putin regime has carried out most frequently since the start of the expanded war in Ukraine in 2022, leaving both Russian officials and independent analysts at a serious loss.