Translated material
The ECHR rejected the complaint of Mikheil Saakashvili
On May 23, the European Court of Human Rights published a decision on the complaint of former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who filed an application with the ECHR in connection with two criminal cases brought against him in Georgia.
The ECHR rejected Saakashvili's complaint, finding that the former president did not provide sufficient evidence of the unfairness of the trials in these cases in Georgia.
They were talking about charges of organizing an attack in 2005 on an opposition member of parliament and of illegally pardoning in 2008 four former Interior Ministry officials convicted of murder.
The ECHR unanimously ruled that Saakashvili was not deprived of the right to a fair trial when considering these cases. By a vote of five to two, the court also ruled that there had been no violation of another article of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides that there can be no punishment for an act that does not constitute a crime.
Saakashvili also claimed in his complaint that the accusations against him were politically motivated. The ECtHR, however, found the charges “serious and well-founded” and indicated that the trial was adversarial and the court gave reasons for its decision.
In 2018, Saakashvili was sentenced in absentia to 6 years in prison in the case of attacking a deputy. He was sentenced to another three years in the case of amnesty for those convicted of murder. Since his arrest upon returning to Georgia in the fall of 2021, Saakashvili has been serving a nine-year sentence. For a long time, however, he has been in a private clinic in Tbilisi for health reasons. Saakashvili still considers his persecution to be politically motivated and claims that the Georgian authorities are carrying out the Kremlin’s order.
Georgian Justice Minister Rati Bregadze called the ECHR decision “a complete victory for the Georgian state.”
The decision was made against the backdrop of mass protests in Georgia against the bill on so-called foreign agents, in which Saakashvili’s supporters play an active role.