Russia’s Judicial Department, which operates under the Supreme Court, has pulled judicial statistics from its website, independent Russian outlets have reported.
The department was required to publish 2025 data by April 20 but missed its own deadline and never released the figures, Sever Realii reported.
On April 21, Verstka, an independent Russian news outlet, found that all statistics from previous years, previously accessible via a direct link, had disappeared. The data had still been available the day before. Attempts to reach the statistics page directly from the site’s main navigation now return a message saying the information is temporarily unavailable.
The Judicial Department confirmed to the independent Russian investigative outlet iStories that it had restricted access to the conviction statistics. “Regulations governing publication are being revised, which is why access to the statistics is currently closed,” the department stated.
Officials were unable to specify what changes were being made. The department did not rule out that updated statistics could be published at a later date, but could not say when, in what form, or how comprehensive the release would be.
The Judicial Department had published conviction data for Russia every six months, including figures on the number of people convicted under specific articles of the criminal code, their demographic characteristics, and the types of sentences handed down. Russian journalists and human rights activists relied on the statistics, among other things, to track the scale of repression in Russia.
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