Georgian Courts Accused of Failing Citizens

Georgian lawyers say increasing government influence over the courts is forcing an ever greater number of citizens to seek justice outside its borders.

According to the European Court of Human Rights, ECHR, the number of cases brought by Georgians against their government has risen to 5,000, with over 2,100 brought in 2009 alone.

“The number of cases is a reaction to the situation in Georgia’s court system,” Ucha Nanuashvili, executive director of the Human Rights Centre, said. “Reforms implemented in this area are completely phoney and people’s have less and less faith in the courts, since the authorities exert great influence on them.”

Nanuashvili added, “The influence of prosecutors on the courts is an especially big problem. Judges have basically been transformed into rubber stamps who implement the decisions of prosecutors.”

Since 1999, when Tbilisi joined the Council of Europe and signed up to the Convention on Human Rights, the ECHR has examined 35 cases from Georgia, and found against the government in 28 of them.

The most recent decision was on May 27, when the court ordered the government to pay 15,000 euro to Batu Saginadze, a former senior officer at the interior ministry who was arrested in 2006. The ECHR also said the state must return the house it had confiscated.

Saginadze, who was convicted of abusing his position and sentenced to seven years in prison, considers himself a political prisoner.

His lawyer Zurab Todua is confident he will be freed.

“Saginadze will be freed from the illegal confinement he has been in for more than four years,” Todua said. “We have already won two cases at the Strasbourg court, and we will win the third. The decisions taken by the court show that Saginadze is being detained illegally.

“The authorities may yet take the correct view of the situation and save the country from even tougher sanctions, not to mention disgrace. The whole world is already saying that there is no legal system in Georgia.”

Many international observers have been highly critical of the Georgian courts, including the American State Department in a report released on March 11 this year.

Georgia’s human rights ombudsman or Public Defender, Giorgi Tugushi, devoted a whole section of his report to parliament this year to problems with judicial independence.

He told IWPR that despite reforms conducted in recent years, the independence of the court system remains a major problem.

“As a result of reforms on which large amounts of money were spent, the judges were retrained and their number increased. The courts were refurbished and fitted with modern technology, but the right to a free trial still remains a problem in this country,” he said.

Tusgushi expressed regret that the authorities were not learning lessons from the ECHR’s decisions.

“The whole point of the Strasbourg court is to help realise people’s chance to have a fair trial in their own country,” he said.

Georgian judges deny coming under political pressure.

The chairman of the Supreme Court, Konstantin Kublashvili, said the rising number of actions brought at the European court had more to do with cases brought by the authorities themselves after the Russian-Georgian war of 2008, coupled with increasing public awareness of ECHR.

He said he believed the number of cases where the state was found to have violated civil rights would prove to be far lower than in other members of the Council of Europe.

“As for citizens’ faith in the court system, this is constantly increasing thanks to the reforms we have implemented,” he said.

His upbeat assessment is not shared by many legal experts.

One group of lawyers is running a project called the “People’s Court”, funded by the European Union, which aims to educate the public about problems in the court system.

Gela Nikolaishvili, one of those behind the project, explained that “these will be simulated legal processes, with the aim of creating public debate about alleged violations by the Georgian authorities. They will be conducted in full accordance with international legal standards. Judges, defence and prosecution will be chosen for their political neutrality and qualifications.”

The People’s Court is currently examining the case of Zurab Vazagashvili, a 24-year-old killed by the police in 2006. His father Yuri knows that any verdict will have no legal force, but is looking for a moral victory.

Todua said decisions by the ECHR court served more or less the same purpose.

“When the Strasbourg court endorses my client – which I am convinced it will – he will already have served more than half his sentence. The same happens in other similar cases, since because of its caseload, the European court takes years to examine a case,” he said. “But moral rehabilitation and compensation are of great significance to people who’ve been unable to secure justice in their own country.”

Natia Kuprashvili is a freelance journalist in Tbilisi.