Not Every Convicted Politician Is a Political Prisoner: Testing the “Wontumi” Designation Against International and Comparative Legal Standards

The most authoritative codified definition of “political prisoner” in international law is PACE Resolution 1900, adopted by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on 3 October 2012, the first such definition adopted by a major intergovernmental organisation. The Resolution, building on criteria originally developed by independent experts in 2001 in the context of Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s accession to the Council of Europe, provides that a person deprived of personal liberty is to be regarded as a political prisoner if any one of five conditions is satisfied: