We Need to Be Able to Talk About Our Disagreements, US Ambassador to Georgia Says
By Khatia Bzhalava
Wednesday, July 20, 2022
We have a very long friendship with Georgia and like all good friends, sometimes we disagree, the U.S. Ambassador to Georgia Kelly Degnan told reporters on Tuesday. The reporter’s question was related to judge Lasha Chkhikvadze and sanctions against him.
“We need to be able to talk about our disagreements and we do that usually in private is most effective. Sometimes we speak out publicly if it is an issue that we have great concerns about, and that is what we did in this case, we issued public statements expressing the United States’ concern about the timing and the charges involved,” Kelly Degnan said.
The ambassador noted that the United States was ‘not alone in expressing these concerns’, stressing that Public Defender, several NGOs, and several other international friends of Georgia had also shared the same concerns. According to her, this process was done’ quite publicly’ and it is ‘quite a normal thing to have happened’. “This is standard practice. I think it’s being spun up. I think a lot of is being made out of something that is absolutely not a scandal. It’s very routine business,” she added.
“The United States has spent a long time working with Georgia’s judiciary, building capacity, and trying to improve the professionalism, transparency, the independence of the judicial system and that has involved a lot of exchanges between the United States experts and the Georgian judges, prosecutors, and attorneys,” the ambassador said, adding that these are routine meetings that happen all the time.
Ambassador Degnan also pointed out the exchange programs which enable Georgians to meet with American counterparts, exchange views, learn from each other, and then bring that back to Georgia. As she stressed, there are over 6,000 Georgians on exchange programs in educational, cultural, and judicial directions.
