Appeals to Strasbourg Court from Georgia
By Khatia Bzhalava
Tuesday, May 26
At the session of the Legal Issues Committee of parliament, Deputy Minister of Ministry of Justice of Georgia, Gocha Lortkipanidze, introduced a report about executing the decisions of Strasbourg court.
As Lortkipanidze stated, despite the state of emergency, in a predetermined time frame, the report of Strasbourg Court has been introduced to the parliament for the fourth time. He considers Parliament's engagement as a very significant component so that international obligations will be properly fulfilled.
Based on the statistics, Lortkipanidze paid attention to the significant decrease in terms of appeals to Strasbourg court from Georgia. As he stated, if there were 395 complaints in 2011 and 367 in 2012, according to the data in 2019, there were considerably few-130 complaints sent to the European Court of Human Rights. Lortkipanidze also focused on the cases against Georgia reviewed by the European Court, which were 2883 in 2012 and 600 by 2019.
“This is not regular statistics, this is a reflection with almost photographic accuracy of the effort and the results of reforms implemented since 2012. It is noteworthy that all this serves to establish institutional democracy,” said Lortkipanidze.
As he stated, on the basis of European Court decisions made by major prosecution in 2017-2019, a criminal proceeding was launched against 13 individuals on five different criminal cases.
Lortkipanidze added that the fight against torture and mistreatment is a crucial interest of theirs and as a result, such behavior is no longer typical for the system. As he said, before 2012, the appeals with regard to the facts of torture and mistreatment were most common alongside the facts of attempt of life.
Chairperson of the Legal issues committee, Anri Okhanashvili stated his loyalty to the principles of European court. As he said, the state still spends millions of Laris from the budget to compensate the individuals whose rights had been strictly violated before 2012.
Okhanashvili mentioned that in the decision of Strasbourg Court, it is explicitly said that the inmates during the ‘Prison Riot’ were killed by the state. He hopes that on the plenary session of this week, he will be able to debate on this very subject with the responsible side which is the former ruling party- National Movement.
The most massive revolt of inmates in Georgia took place on March 27th 2006 in Tbilisi’s Prison N5 and is known as the ‘Prison Riot.’ During the clash between special forces and the prisoners, several inmates died, which later became the reason for severe political debates.
