Georgia accused of holding political prisoners

Georgian human rights groups are becoming increasingly concerned about the number of opposition figures being prosecuted in the country, despite government denials that the people in question are political prisoners, a new report said.

They say the number of political prisoners rose sharply following the months of protests earlier this year against President Mikhail Saakashvili, who rejected protesters’ demands that he resign.

The groups won support from the International Federation for Human Rights, or FIDH, which concluded in a report in August that Georgian authorities were holding political prisoners, whose release was demanded by the federation.

Georgian officials strongly deny the existence of political prisoners, and international organizations have not accused the country of holding such people – unlike neighboring Armenia and Azerbaijan – but FIDH investigators came to their conclusions after meeting the families of inmates, their lawyers and studying court documents.

“These cases mainly demonstrate how some political opponents, often people who fund the political opposition or influential individuals linked to the opposition, are arrested and detained after being sentenced in totally – or partially – fabricated judicial cases,” the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, or IWPR, quoted the FIDH’s statement as saying.

“The most frequently used charges involve illegal storage of weapons or drugs, extortion and attempting to overthrow the government,” said the report.

Pilot cases

The FIDH could not give the total number of political prisoners, publishing instead what they describe as eight pilot cases designed to give an overview of the problems faced by opposition activists in Georgia. Opposition groups and rights activists say the real number of prisoners is much larger.

“Illegally detained people and people whose property has been seized are the biggest section of the population to have been harmed by this government. Sadly, there are no accurate figures for the number of these people just yet,” said Zakharia Kutsnashvili, head of the pressure group Law for People.

Saakashvili has consistently brushed off such allegations. He came to power in a bloodless 2003 coup – the so-called Rose Revolution – on promises to create democracy in Georgia and to take the country into the European Union and NATO. He has faced problems in doing so, not least from the massive opposition protests, yet insists his goals have not changed.

“We are following through on the promises I made … to strengthen our democracy, foster pluralism and expand individual liberties. Already, we have set reforms in motion, which within the next year will advance the progress of the Rose Revolution and irreversibly deepen our identity as the freest state in our region,” he told the General Assembly of the United Nations in September.

“We permitted nearly three months of opposition protests to proceed unhindered, even though they closed down the main street of our capital, reflecting our deep commitment to pluralism and our respect for dissent and freedom of speech,” he said.

That is not a picture recognized by the leaders of the opposition groups to which he was referring. They said they are working on creating a list of people arrested or prosecuted for political reasons. David Zurabishvili, leader of the Republican Party, said the people were arrested specifically for taking part in the protests the government claimed to have tolerated.

“There have been cases when people were arrested at protests organized by the opposition. Two supporters of the Republican Party were detained in Gori. That small town, and those people, know well what methods the authorities use to try to scare society and to deter people from taking part in the opposition protests,” he told the IWPR.

One alleged example of a fabricated case is that of Nora Kvitsiani, sister of the leader of a paramilitary police unit that existed autonomously in a mountainous, Georgian-controlled region of Abkhazia. Emzar Kvitsiani, Nora’s brother, went into hiding in 2006 after resisting attempts by the government to disarm the unit. His sister was then arrested and convicted of illegally owning weapons, stealing humanitarian aid, and commanding an armed group. She was imprisoned in 2007 for six-and-a-half years. Her allies say a state audit showed no aid had been stolen, and it was never proven that the weapons belonged to her, rather than to her brother as she argued.

The government denies that Kvitsiani – and the other seven case studies in the FIDH report – are truly political prisoners, but opposition activists say the findings are likely to increase Western pressure on Georgia to follow through on its promises.

“The fact that there are political prisoners in Georgia is no longer in doubt. A different question is how to free them. If the authorities recognize that they are innocent, then we will have to punish the investigators, the prosecutors and pay compensation to the defendant, and the government will not do this,” said Sopho Khorguani, representative of the Alliance for Georgia.

“But, set against this, the West is putting pressure on the Georgian government and it will have to take some kind of decision in response.”