Belarus has recorded its first human-trafficking conviction in five years and identified 345 victims. Yet the country remains in the lowest category of the United States’ annual assessment, because those figures have not persuaded Washington that the system enabling forced labour has changed.
Published on 28 October 2026, the US State Department report says thousands of Belarusian citizens remain exposed to forced labour, particularly in correctional colonies and medical-labour institutions. Political prisoners are among those at risk, the report says, in a system where refusing an order can carry consequences and independent protection is difficult to obtain.
The numbers that did not shift the verdict
Tier 3 is the report’s lowest ranking. It is used for governments that do not fully meet the minimum standards for eliminating human trafficking and, in the department’s assessment, are not making significant efforts to meet them.
Belarus’s latest figures might have indicated a tougher official response. Authorities identified 345 trafficking victims during 2025, while a court handed down the first conviction in a trafficking case for five years. But Washington’s assessment is that individual enforcement action does not amount to a sustained effort to dismantle the structures in which exploitation can occur.
That distinction is central to the report. A conviction shows that one case reached court; it does not establish that detainees can safely reject assigned work, report abuse or obtain an effective remedy. Nor does the identification of victims, by itself, prove that those people received meaningful protection.
The report’s conclusion is therefore about institutions as much as prosecutions. It says the authorities under Alexander Lukashenko continue to use state-controlled prisons and medical-labour facilities in ways that expose people to coercion. The assessment does not mean that every prisoner ordered to work is automatically a victim of trafficking. It identifies the conditions in which consent may be compromised and refusal may be unrealistic.
When detention becomes leverage
In an ordinary job, a worker can normally leave, challenge an instruction or seek help outside the organisation. Those safeguards are sharply reduced in detention. The authorities control a prisoner’s movements, living conditions, discipline and contact with relatives or legal representatives. A person who objects to an assigned task may face further disciplinary pressure, while complaints are likely to remain within the same state system that imposed the work.
That is why the report treats prison labour as a question of coercion rather than simply employment. The crucial issue is not whether a task has been formally assigned, but whether the person carrying it out has a genuine ability to refuse without punishment or retaliation.
Political prisoners face an additional layer of vulnerability. Their detention is already part of the wider repression attributed to Lukashenko’s government, and the prison administration has control over the practical conditions of their daily lives. Forced work can consequently become more than a source of labour: it can serve as another means of discipline and pressure.
The State Department’s assessment presents this as a continuing feature of the system, rather than an isolated abuse by individual officials. Years of international criticism have not, in Washington’s view, produced evidence of a credible change in direction.
A separate concern involving Ukrainian children
The report also highlights Belarus’s role in the movement of more than 3,500 Ukrainian children since 2022 from territories occupied by Russian forces. It says some of the children were subjected to ideological re-education and military training.
This issue is separate from forced labour in Belarusian prisons, but it adds an international dimension to the report’s concerns about state control over vulnerable people. Children transferred from occupied territory cannot freely determine where they live or which programmes they attend. The report’s wording does not suggest that every child experienced the same treatment; it identifies the transfers and the reported programmes as matters requiring international scrutiny.
Taken together, the findings explain why the 2025 statistics did not improve Belarus’s ranking. A state can investigate selected cases and still leave intact the institutions that make coercion possible. For those held in correctional colonies and medical-labour facilities, the unresolved question is whether they have any practical way to refuse work or challenge abuse without placing themselves at greater risk.
