Georgia — Target the Judges

Once a reliable partner of the West, Georgia is now becoming a Russian-style dictatorship. The West must do more to avert this outcome.

Photo: Shota Kincha/OC Media

After a deeply questionable 2024 parliamentary election and the ruling Georgian Dream’s decision to suspend its efforts to join the European Union (EU), daily protests erupted across the country. The authorities underlined their authoritarian turn by responding with systemic torture, police brutality, hefty fines, and imprisonment. 

Today, Georgia has more than 60 political prisoners, and while the protests still continue, they are smaller than previously. Civic groups and opposition political parties are fighting back, but after eight months of continuous struggle, Western support is badly needed, both as a signal of commitment and as a warning to the regime that it cannot act with impunity. 

A good start would involve the sanctioning of all judges involved in prosecuting political prisoners and an offer of support to those within the regime who refuse to cooperate with the authorities.

All political prisoners face equally inhumane treatment in a country where the judiciary is fully controlled by the billionaire oligarch behind Georgia’s authoritarian turn, Bidzina Ivanishvili. He came to power 13 years ago, promising to reform the judicial system. Yet, more than a decade later, Georgia’s courts are less independent than ever. 

Take the case of political prisoner Mzia Amaglobeli, a founder of some of the most respected news outlets in the country. On January 12, Mzia was detained for attaching a sticker to the wall of the police department in Batumi. She was soon released. During her detention, the head of Batumi Police, Irakli Dgebuadze, repeatedly verbally abused her and even spat on her. When she was released, she slapped him on his cheek in a sign of protest. Dgebuadze was heard swearing at Mzia on camera, threatening to catch her and put her in jail for many years. 

Even by the standards of Georgian law, if it were determined that Mzia’s action had been unprovoked by the policeman, she would face a fine or a few weeks in solitary confinement. Mzia has been sentenced to two years in prison.

Mzia’s court hearings have attracted hundreds of people, many of whom were unable to fit into the courtroom and instead protested outside the building. The prosecution wasn’t able to find any credible evidence that the policeman even experienced any pain from Mzia’s slap, and several medical experts have concluded that there is no basis to claim any physical harm, yet the judge’s ruling was predetermined. 

Her case is one example of the role that judges play in strengthening the regime. By fining people unprecedented amounts of money and issuing heavy sentences, they send a clear message to everyone dissatisfied with Georgian Dream: no matter the evidence or the lack of it, you are guilty even if proven innocent. If the Georgian Dream regime is to be weakened, its judiciary must be weakened first. 

Regimes fall when the cost of supporting the authorities exceeds the costs of defecting. When the ruling elites lack sufficient active enthusiasts and have a largely passive support base, their rule eventually crumbles. Georgia is no exception. After many internal struggles, disappointments, and discussions, we, the absolute majority of Georgia’s opposition parties, civil society, and grassroots groups, agreed that the key to reversing Georgia’s authoritarian trajectory is to follow this equation: completely isolate the Georgian Dream party by non-cooperation and disable its main enablers. 

As a protest movement, we are working on isolating the Georgian Dream from its passive supporter base by mobilizing people and registering new members of the opposition in each of Georgia’s 69 municipalities. We are trying to make passive supporters and neutrally minded people aware of the regime’s brutality, as well as the dangers of their intended pro-Russian course. But we are unable to disable the enablers without international assistance — it is a crucial step in combating any authoritarian regime.

During the 2011 Egyptian revolution, some army officers stationed at Tahrir Square openly defected and joined the protesters, voicing their opposition to the regime. “Of course, this puts me in danger, but I am on the right side. I’m with the people. If I die, I will die with a clean conscience,” said one. Similarly, in Romania in 1989, soldiers defected and joined the protesters against the Ceaușescu regime, with demonstrators eventually toppling the dictatorship. There are many examples from different countries and periods where key regime props start defecting, and the dictatorship comes tumbling down. 

We understand that for Georgians, this is a hard decision. In a country where almost a quarter of all employed people work in the civil service, the ruling elite uses financial incentives, intimidation, and harsh economic conditions to make it more profitable for the public sector to support the government, rather than defect from it. The anti-regime movement in Georgia simply doesn’t have enough resources to change the equation for all civil servants.

But Europe and the US do. The international community could assist this slow-motion descent into Putinism without any financial commitment, weapons, or aid. The idea of sanctioning judges and regime supporters violating the right to due process and applying inhumane treatment is one element, but there is a second and supporting component to this policy. In order to make it less costly to defect from the regime, democracies should also offer security guarantees and international protection to high-profile figures who choose to defect. 

This is not unprecedented, and it works. Syrian general Manaf Tlass’s defection to France, en masse defections of Libyan ambassadors from the Gaddafi dictatorship, and protections offered to East Germans all played a significant role in the weakening of their respective regimes. 

Even in Georgia, a senior police officer, Irakli Shaishmelashvili, defected from the regime after several years of serving in the Special Tasks Department and was offered protection and relocation to the US in December. If Mzia’s judge was offered the same protection from Georgian Dream’s revenge in exchange for a fair judgment on Mzia’s upcoming final trial, the reverberations would shake the regime, and the outcome for Mzia might have been different. 

Failure to act strategically and quickly would result in the loss of a strategic partner in the Black Sea region, a loss that would not be unnoticed for both the European security architecture and for US economic interests in the region. And it would boost the autocratic alliance of Russia and Iran just after its setback in Armenia and Azerbaijan. The cost of acting is much lower than the cost of abstaining. 

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By Davit Jintcharadze. Davit Jintcharadze is one of the founding members of the Freedom Square political party and the founder of Freedom Fund, a UK-based crowdsourcing initiative that supports protesters in Georgia. Article first time published on CEPA web page. Prepared for publication by volunteers from the Res Publica - The Center for Civil Resistance.