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€12 million over five years for documenting repression in Belarus
04.10.2026

€12 million over five years for documenting repression in Belarus

The International Accountability Platform for Belarus (IAPB) was established in 2021 to collect and preserve evidence of grave human rights violations committed by the authorities of Belarus in connection with the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath. Over five years, the platform has received around €12 million. This report compares the volume of funding with the declared results and assesses how far those results can be verified from open sources. It draws on the financial statements of the platform's lead organisation, the IAPB's semi-annual progress reports, the position of its management and the external evaluation of the project.

Establishment and members of the platform

The platform was established on 24 March 2021 following the report by Professor Wolfgang Benedek, prepared in November 2020 under the Moscow Mechanism of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). The report recommended that evidence of violations committed in Belarus be collected and preserved.
The lead organisation is DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture. The co-leads are the Human Rights Centre Viasna, the International Committee for the Investigation of Torture in Belarus and the British human rights organisation REDRESS, which works on behalf of torture survivors. At its launch, the platform's Steering Committee and Secretariat were headed by DIGNITY's Medical Director Jens Modvig. The Secretariat is based in Copenhagen, and its initial staff numbered around 10 people.
The platform has an Advisory Council. In addition to a number of organisations from Belarus, it includes the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT), the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT).
On the day the platform was launched, 19 states issued a joint statement in its support. It was signed by Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. According to the statement, the collected materials are intended for criminal investigations and proceedings before national, regional and international courts. The platform is funded through contributions from donor states.

Disclosure of expenditure

The IAPB and DIGNITY received a formal request to disclose aggregated data on the platform's spending on staff, rent and IT infrastructure, training, funding of partner organisations and assistance to survivors, as well as on the effectiveness of that assistance. A separate question concerned staffing, since the DIGNITY website lists 4 employees working on Belarus, while the platform's reports refer to at least 11.
In November 2025, a reply signed by the Head of the IAPB, Andrea Huber, was received. It contained no financial data. The reply referred to regular auditing of the project, reporting to donors and a recent external evaluation, and recommended consulting the platform's semi-annual reports for details. It also stated that "some information you requested is not publicly available though, as would be the case for any other project of this nature". Which information is considered non-public, and why, was not specified.
The reply contains no audit opinions, no name of an auditor and no links to the relevant documents. The external evaluation it mentions is not a financial audit but a programme evaluation commissioned by DIGNITY itself. This in itself does not indicate any misuse of funds, but it makes the platform's expenditure impossible to verify from open sources.
As regards results, the reply reasonably pointed to the limits of the IAPB's mandate. The platform documents violations and shares materials, but "it is, however, not in the control of an NGO platform whether States initiate criminal investigations". The reply also mentioned positive feedback from national and international bodies on the quality of the materials, yet it named no proceedings in which they had been used and no legal outcome achieved.

Funding in 2021–2025

According to DIGNITY's financial statements, donor contributions to the IAPB in 2021–2025 amounted to around DKK 89.1 million, or approximately €12 million, an average of about €2.4 million per year. The largest amounts were received in 2022 and 2023, around DKK 26.9 million and DKK 24.6 million, or €3.6 million and €3.3 million respectively. In 2021 the platform received DKK 7.7 million, or about €1 million; in 2024, DKK 17.1 million, or about €2.3 million; and in 2025, DKK 12.7 million, or about €1.7 million. Euro amounts have been converted from Danish kroner at the average annual exchange rate and rounded.
It should be borne in mind that these figures refer to income. DIGNITY's financial statements also show total expenditure on the IAPB, around DKK 17.0 million, or €2.3 million, in 2024 and DKK 12.0 million, or €1.6 million, in 2025, but without any breakdown by item. They therefore do not show how much went on staff, rent or assistance to survivors, or what share of the funds was passed on to other consortium members. This is precisely the information that was requested from the IAPB and DIGNITY.
DIGNITY's annual accounts are audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), and the auditor's report for 2025, on pages 4–8 of the annual report, contains no material critical comments. However, this audit covers DIGNITY as a whole and does not disclose the structure of the platform's expenditure.

Results according to the IAPB's own reporting

Between April 2025 and March 2026, the IAPB published two progress reports: the ninth, covering 1 April to 30 September 2025, and the tenth, covering 1 October 2025 to 30 March 2026. As of the end of March 2026, the platform reported the following:
  • 38,146 documents in its witness-related database, including 3,351 interview transcripts from 2,911 witnesses;
  • 2,199,397 items from open sources;
  • 440 witness summaries, more than 200 of which were shared with the International Criminal Court (ICC) and national prosecutors at their request;
  • assistance to criminal justice authorities of six states in response to 14 requests, as well as submissions to the ICC, United Nations (UN) and OSCE mechanisms, lawyers and civil society organisations;
  • mental health and psychosocial support for a cumulative total of 850 survivors, including about 133 in the last six months.
All of these figures are the IAPB's own indicators and cannot be independently verified from open sources.
Comparing these figures with the level of funding raises questions. If the entire budget is attributed to collecting witness materials, each interviewed witness cost roughly €4,100 and each document in the database roughly €315. This is an upper bound, since the funds also covered psychological support, analysis and work with prosecutors, but without disclosure of the expenditure structure a more precise calculation is impossible. At the same time, much of this routine work can now be automated at almost no cost. Transcribing all 3,351 interviews with automatic speech recognition, assuming an average interview length of two hours, would cost around $2,500 at market rates, while the open-source Whisper model can do this free of charge on an organisation's own hardware, without sharing sensitive recordings with third parties. Widely used artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are available by subscription for a few tens of dollars a month and, subject to data protection requirements, can also translate transcripts, structure testimonies and draft witness summaries. According to the platform's own data, it already uses automated translation into English. Collecting open-source material can likewise be largely automated.
An international example is instructive. The Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) received around CAD 3 million a year from the Government of Canada alone, which at the average annual exchange rate amounts to roughly $2.2–2.3 million. Working in wartime conditions, the Commission collected more than 1.3 million pages of Syrian regime documents, and, according to its own reports, these materials contributed to the first convictions of Syrian officials. The IAPB's annual income is around €2.4 million, or approximately $2.6 million, which is even slightly more than the Canadian contribution. Taking into account CIJA's 12 other donors, the budgets of the two organisations are broadly comparable, yet the IAPB cannot yet point to a comparable judicial outcome. The question therefore remains whether the current level of spending is justified and whether the same work could be done more cheaply, with wider use of modern technology and the experience of volunteer initiatives.
The figure for psychological support deserves particular attention. According to the IAPB, 850 people have received such support since the platform was established. Neither the platform's website nor media reports describe how this support is organised. It is provided by specialists who speak the survivors' native languages and English. To a large extent it consists of referring survivors to external specialists and medical centres in several countries, as well as the option of having a psychologist present during or after an interview. Recipients' wellbeing is tracked through a unified clinical monitoring system with questionnaires on stress, depression, sleep and wellbeing. The same support is used by members of the IAPB teams, and the fifth report gives the number of sessions only for staff, not for survivors. The format of the support, whether in person or online, the number of sessions per person and the expenditure on this area are not stated anywhere. It is therefore unclear whether a "recipient" is someone who completed a course of therapy or someone who met a psychologist once while giving testimony. Without information on format, providers and costs, neither the real scale of this support nor its cost can be assessed.

The International Criminal Court investigation and the role of the IAPB

In its tenth report, the platform links its work to the decision of the ICC Office of the Prosecutor of 12 March 2026 to open an investigation into the situation in Lithuania/Belarus, and claims to have played "a key role through comprehensive evidence provision". According to the report, in December 2024 the platform submitted a communication to the Office of the Prosecutor under Article 15 of the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the ICC, which allows organisations and individuals to provide the Prosecutor with information on possible crimes. Four further evidence packages followed during 2025.
The transfer of materials is documented in the platform's reports, and the opening of the investigation is confirmed by the Court. The claim of a "key role" is the IAPB's own assessment.
The procedure was initiated by a state. On 30 September 2024, Lithuania referred the situation to the ICC under Articles 13(a) and 14(1) of the Rome Statute, that is, through a formal state referral, and in early October 2024 the Office of the Prosecutor opened a preliminary examination to determine whether there was a basis for a full investigation. Non-governmental organisations, including the IAPB, have no power to initiate proceedings before the ICC themselves. They can only provide information to the Prosecutor, while an investigation is opened on referral by a State Party or the UN Security Council, or on the Prosecutor's own initiative with the authorisation of the judges. The IAPB's communication was submitted after the preliminary examination had already begun, so its materials could only have been used in the course of that examination.
The Office of the Prosecutor is focusing primarily on deportation and persecution through deportation, that is, on crimes committed at least partly on the territory of Lithuania since 1 May 2020. Most of the IAPB's materials concern torture, detention and other violations inside Belarus and may be only partly relevant to this subject matter. The extent to which the platform's materials influenced the Prosecutor's decision cannot be established from open sources.
The IAPB was not the only actor documenting crimes and submitting materials to the ICC. According to the Belarusian Women's Foundation (BWF), it began collecting testimonies from victims and witnesses in October 2020 under its "Road to The Hague" project, and in May 2021 submitted a request to the ICC for an investigation concerning Alexander Lukashenko. According to the Foundation, the project operates without grant funding, but this has not been independently confirmed.

Programme evaluation commissioned by DIGNITY

In 2025, DIGNITY commissioned an evaluation of the IAPB's work since its establishment. Following a competitive tender, the contract was awarded to the Spanish consultancy Blomeyer & Sanz, founded in 2004 and specialising in programme evaluations for the institutions of the European Union, the Council of Europe, the OSCE and the UN Development Programme. The evaluation was carried out between May and September 2025 against the five criteria of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: relevance, coherence, effectiveness, impact and sustainability. Fifty-nine stakeholders were interviewed. According to the terms of reference, published by DIGNITY in April 2025 and no longer available on its website at the time of writing, the detailed evaluation plan was agreed with the management of the IAPB and DIGNITY.
The full report has not been published; only its executive summary is publicly available. The overall conclusion is unequivocally positive. The evaluators found the IAPB "to have demonstrated very strong performance across all evaluation criteria".
The evaluation is based on document analysis and interviews with IAPB staff, partners and beneficiaries. Beneficiaries include survivors, prosecutors, international organisations, lawyers and civil society organisations. Several key indicators rely on the beneficiaries' own judgements on the quality of the evidence base, on support for witnesses and survivors, and on what would have happened without the IAPB. Accordingly, the conclusion that without the platform the regime might have gone unpunished reflects the respondents' opinions rather than the result of comparative or causal analysis. The composition of the respondents, including whether recipients of psychological support were interviewed, is not clear from the published document.
The methodology also includes a quantitative indicator for the number of cases in which IAPB materials were actually used in criminal prosecution. Its value is not given in the executive summary. Publication of the full report would make it possible to verify the data on which the final conclusions are based.
The evaluators note that "impact in terms of perpetrators brought to justice can only be assessed in the long term". They also point to difficulties in securing interviews with representatives of national prosecution services and recommend that the IAPB systematically collect data on its engagement with them.
They further note that the IAPB lacks a formulated theory of change, that is, a logical model linking evidence collection, support for survivors and engagement with prosecutors to the ultimate goal of bringing perpetrators to justice. The evaluators recommend developing such a model.
Several recommendations concern the platform's future. The evaluators propose focusing on new trends, in particular new units of the security forces involved in violations and new places of detention, explicitly linking this to the task of keeping Belarus on the agenda of international partners and donors. They also note that IAPB documenters want more stable contractual arrangements, as some of them are concerned about their long-term prospects in exile.
Given the volume of material already accumulated, the key task is no longer further data collection but identifying gaps in the evidence base, the specific needs of prosecutors and the criteria by which the stage of large-scale documentation can be considered complete. The evaluation does not establish what drives the need for further funding: outstanding investigative needs or the maintenance of infrastructure built up over five years. The combination of these recommendations does not prove that new tasks are being devised in order to secure continued funding, but it does make the question of criteria for continuing the project a legitimate one.

Conclusion

Over five years, DIGNITY received around €12 million for the IAPB's work. The results of this work are known only from the platform's own reporting and cannot be independently verified. The formal request for information on expenditure received no substantive answer, and the only external review the platform refers to is a programme evaluation commissioned by DIGNITY itself.
The central question, however, lies beyond the reporting. The platform was created so that the evidence collected would be used in criminal investigations and courts. Investigations under universal jurisdiction opened in Lithuania and Poland have, according to available information, not yet led to trials of either Alexander Lukashenko or the perpetrators of the 2020 repression. The International Criminal Court opened an investigation only in March 2026, on Lithuania's referral and within a limited scope, and has not yet issued any arrest warrants. The evaluators themselves acknowledge that results in terms of punishing perpetrators can only be assessed in the long term, and the project still lacks a model linking the collection of materials to this goal.
As a result, it remains unclear what these materials are ultimately being collected for. If the aim is to create a historical archive of the regime's crimes, such work should be assessed against different criteria, with funding scaled accordingly. If the aim is the criminal prosecution of perpetrators, then after five years and €12 million the project should have measurable legal results or at least a clear plan for achieving them. The IAPB's public reporting shows neither.
This is not a call to disclose information that must remain protected, such as data on witnesses, details of investigations or information affecting the security of partners. Assessing the project requires only aggregated data on the breakdown of expenditure, summary indicators on the use of materials in criminal proceedings and measurable criteria of success. Without them, there remains a well-founded concern that a substantial share of the funds allocated to help the people of Belarus is absorbed into the organisations' own budgets and spent on work whose benefit to survivors and to justice has not been demonstrated.
This material is based on research by Alliance Resistance Belarus.

Sources and links

  1. Analysis of the activities of IAPB/Dignity in 2021–2024 (24.08.2025). https://bolkunets.org
  2. DIGNITY financial statements for 2025. https://dignity.dk/app/uploads/Aarsregnskab_2025_v4.pdf
  3. DIGNITY financial statements for 2024. https://dignity.dk/app/uploads/Annual-Report-2024-DIGNITY-24.04.2025-.pdf
  4. DIGNITY on the establishment of the IAPB (2021). https://dignity.dk/en/?p=40593
  5. Joint statement by 19 states in support of the IAPB (24.03.2021). https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-by-19-states-in-support-of-the-establishment-of-the-international-accountability-platform-for-belarus
  6. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic on the IAPB and the Benedek report. https://mzv.gov.cz/mission.vienna/en/latest/initiative_to_document_human_rights.html
  7. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania on the establishment of the IAPB (24.03.2021). https://mfa.lt/en/news/928/the-international-accountability-platform-for-belarus-responsible-for-the-documentation-of-human-rights-violations-established-today:34544
  8. All IAPB progress reports. https://iapbelarus.org/progress-reports/
  9. IAPB 2nd progress report (February 2022). https://iapbelarus.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IAPB_SecondReport_Public_FINAL_2022.pdf
  10. IAPB 3rd progress report. https://spring96.org/files/misc/iapb_thirdreport_public_eng.pdf
  11. IAPB 5th progress report (October 2023). https://iapbelarus.org/app/uploads/2023/11/IAPb_Oct2023_Report_Public_ENG_1121.pdf
  12. IAPB 9th progress report (01.04.2025 – 30.09.2025). https://iapbelarus.org/app/uploads/2025/11/IAPB-9th-Progress-Report-public-version-17-Nov-2025-.pdf
  13. IAPB 9th progress report, full version including the section on psychological support. https://iapbelarus.org/app/uploads/2025/11/IAPB-9th-Progress-Report_5-Nov-2025.pdf
  14. IAPB 10th progress report (01.10.2025 – 30.03.2026). https://iapbelarus.org/app/uploads/2026/05/IAPB-10th-Progress-report-April-2026.pdf
  15. External evaluation of the IAPB, executive summary (Blomeyer & Sanz, 2025). https://iapbelarus.org/app/uploads/2025/12/IAPB-Final-Evaluation-Report-Exec-Summary-website.pdf
  16. DIGNITY terms of reference for the external evaluation, April 2025, no longer available on the DIGNITY website at the time of writing.
  17. Blomeyer & Sanz on the IAPB evaluation. https://www.blomeyer.eu/?p=17738
  18. Blomeyer & Sanz, team and clients. https://www.blomeyer.eu/team/
  19. Lithuania's referral of the situation to the ICC (30.09.2024). https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/2024-09/2024-09-30-state-party-referral-lithuania.pdf
  20. ICC, summary of preliminary examination findings (12.03.2026). https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/2026-03/Summary-of-findings-Situation-Lithuania-Belarus.pdf
  21. Doughty Street Chambers on the ICC decision. https://www.doughtystreet.co.uk/news/international-criminal-court-opens-investigation-situation-belarus-lithuania
  22. International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) on the ICC decision. https://www.fidh.org/en/region/europe-central-asia/belarus/belarus-icc-office-of-the-prosecutor-opens-investigation-into-crimes
  23. LRT on the universal jurisdiction investigation in Lithuania (04.10.2024). https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/2375532/behind-lithuania-s-push-to-take-lukashenko-to-court
  24. Belarusian Women's Foundation, "Road to The Hague" project. https://belaruswomen.org/ru/news/icc-office-belarus-lithuania-2-2
  25. The Globe and Mail on Canada's funding of CIJA. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-al-assads-nuremberg-moment-page-by-page-an-ngo-and-its-canadian
  26. CIJA annual reports. https://www.cijaonline.org/cija-annual-reports
  27. Bank of Canada average annual CAD/USD exchange rates. https://www.taxtips.ca/filing/foreign-exchange-rate-history.htm
  28. Automatic speech transcription pricing (OpenAI Whisper). https://lmmarketcap.com/openai-whisper-pricing

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