The UN special rapporteur on Belarus, Nils Muižnieks, has written a report on women’s rights. The document is dated 14 September 2026. Its symbol is A/81/372. He will present it at the 81st session of the General Assembly. The conclusion is short: discrimination in Belarus is structural and systemic. Since 2020 the old inequality has been woven together with political repression. On 15 October Viasna set out the themes. What follows is what the report itself says.
Pay, the household, 88 occupations
In a Belstat time-use survey for 2024–2025, women do 1.7 times more unpaid housework and childcare than men. In 2025 a father took childcare leave in only one family in a hundred. That leave, and care for relatives, barely counts toward a pension. The pension is smaller because of it.
The pay gap holds at 24–28 percent. Women are 53 percent of the employed, but 84.8 percent of health and social-care workers and 81.8 percent of education workers. In information technology their pay is 37.7 percent lower. In mining they are 19.8 percent, in construction 14.1.
The list of occupations banned to women was cut in 2022 from 181 to 88. The rapporteur writes that the authorities explain what remains by reproductive health. That is not equal access to work, and it hardens the stereotype. Dangerous work, he argues, should be made safer for everyone, not closed to women.
A separate line is bans “for extremism”: file checks, a bar on the profession. They hit public-sector workers, lawyers, tour guides, notaries, teachers and publishers. Women are numerous in these fields, so the blow lands harder on them.
A plan on paper, and an empty top
In November 2025 the government adopted a national plan for 2026–2030. The rapporteur writes that the plan is not fully built on rights. In it a woman is first of all a mother and a carer. There are no measures against discrimination on sexual orientation and gender identity. Independent society is not allowed into implementation or oversight. Violence against women is treated there as a matter of crime and social protection, not of discrimination.
On 1 June 2026 the Council of Ministers renewed the National Council on Gender Policy. It is almost entirely state bodies. From outside, the Belarusian Union of Women and the Federation of Trade Unions, both tied to the authorities. There is no law that would cover harassment at work. Belarus has not ratified ILO Convention No. 190 on violence and harassment.
Lower down, women are present. In 2024 they were 71.4 percent of civil servants and 32.7 percent of the National Assembly. At the top the share falls. In 2025 women held 4.3 percent of posts in the Council of Ministers. Among heads of institutions under the Council, 3.3 percent. A woman has never been governor of a region. Among ambassadors they are 6 percent. The report’s example of the stereotype is dictator Lukashenka declaring 2026 the year of the Belarusian woman: in that policy a woman is first a mother and an assistant, not a holder of rights.
Article 19.16 of the administrative code punishes information that forms a positive view of voluntary childlessness. The rapporteur asks for it to be repealed. In a 2024 Belstat survey, 45 percent of women reported psychological violence in the family, 15 percent economic violence, and 7 percent persecution by former partners. Women also stay silent for fear that their children will be taken or the family labelled “socially dangerous.” Independent help shrank after 2020: before 2021 there were at least 31 women’s organisations; by 2025, six registered ones remained, and 13 public associations working on women and gender.
Political prisoners and lists
Since 2020, the rapporteur writes, 7,655 people have been convicted in criminal cases with a political background. In 2025 alone, at least 1,254, of whom 355 were women. At the end of August 2026 Viasna counted 889 people in detention, 124 of them women. That is the August snapshot, not a later one.
As of June 2026 the “extremist list” held more than 6,754 people, and women were more than 24 percent. In June alone 95 people were added, 19 of them women. On the “terrorist list” in May 2026 there were 699 citizens of Belarus, among them women convicted for the peaceful exercise of basic freedoms.
On 19 March 2026 Minsk City Court, in the “courtyard chats” case, found at least 50 people guilty, 39 of them women. Eight women were given from 8 years and 3 months to 10 years. At the end of March at least 21 women from this circle were still imprisoned. The rapporteur writes that what was charged as a crime was solidarity: help to the elderly, to children with disabilities, to families of political prisoners, to people from Ukraine. Since 2020 at least 60 women lawyers have been stripped of the right to practise. As of July 2026 at least four were under criminal prosecution, and two were still in prison.
The colony
Women held on political charges are kept more harshly than the rest. They are written down as “prone to extremist activity”: a yellow pass, fewer letters, visits, transfers, and less study. A minor or invented breach is stacked until it becomes “malicious,” and then comes article 411 and a new sentence. Those who do not admit guilt and do not ask for a pardon, according to the accounts, are sent to the punishment cell again and again.
A former political prisoner released in March 2026 called the punishment cell “legally sanctioned torture”: about six months in solitary, cold, no sleep, humiliation. The cell is about 10 square metres. The bed is unfolded only for sleep, until five in the morning. After that, stand or sit on a stool. Former prisoners told the rapporteur they were denied bras, underwear and hair ties, that menstrual products were tightly limited, showers were restricted and searches were humiliating. A camera watches the toilet, and hygiene during a period has to be managed under the lens.
The particular alarm is women’s colony No. 4 in Homiel. Examinations are delayed, specialist care is refused, labour is forced, even in serious illness. The report notes delayed diagnosis for a woman political prisoner who developed cancer, and reports that at least two women died of cancer in detention. Most women in this colony, according to the rapporteur, sew uniforms and equipment for the police, the army, the prison service and the KGB. Former political prisoners spoke of what it is like to sew the uniform of the agencies that imprisoned them. Pay ran from less than one euro to about 35 euros a month, with deductions for upkeep. Refusal to work is a disciplinary offence and a path to article 411. Those labelled “terrorists,” according to the accounts, were barred from money sent by relatives: prison labour was the only income left.