Tbilisi City Court has fined Beka Tsikarishvili, who became an icon for drug reform activists in the country, with ₾2,000 ($820) for possession of 69 grammes of cannabis.
Tsikarisvhili was also banned from driving, teaching, or practicing law for the next five years, and from working in the medical and pharmaceutical sector for 10 years.
Following the verdict, Tsikarishvili posted a photo on Facebook saying ‘this is not over, time to decriminalise’].
‘I am thankful that I shared the pain of thousands of others who are charged with drug-related crimes’, Netgazetiquoted Tsikarishvili as saying on 16 August, during his trial.
Tsikarishvili was detained in May 2013 and faced up to 14 years in prison. He spent 18 days in jail, before being released on bail.
The case led to a large-scale campaign calling for his release and softer drug laws on social media and in the streets, with the slogan ‘Beka is not a criminal’. The campaign later gave birth to drug reform group the White Noise Movement.
Drug reform has since become an important issue for the country’s youth, regularly bringing large numbers out in protest.
In response to the case, in 2015 Georgia’s Constitutional Court declared imprisonment for possession of 69 grammes of cannabis or less unconstitutional.
In another Constitutional Court case in 2016, brought by Georgia’s Public Defender, who labelled imprisonment for cannabis possession ‘irrelevant, too strict, and degrading’, the court ruled imprisonment for possession and consumption of any amount of cannabis unconstitutional.
In july 2017, Parliament amended the law to comply with the ruling, imposing a fine for cannabis possession instead of jail time, but maintaining it as a criminal offence.
Several rights groups, such as the White Noise Movement, have vowed to fight on, as the measures fall short of decriminalisation.
Tbilisi City Court sentenced actor Giorgi ‘Bakhala’ Giorganashvili to eight years in prison on 23 January on drug charges. Giorganashvili had claimed that police had planted the drugs on him.
Giorganashvili was arrested on 29 January 2017 for ‘possession of 0.3726 grammes of buprenorphine’, an opioid used to treat opioid addiction, while travelling from western Georgia to Tbilisi.
After hearing the court’s ruling, Beka Tsikarishvili, a drug reform icon, threw a brick at the courthouse
Parliamentary hearings around Georgia’s drug decriminalisation bill, scheduled to take off on 28 November, have been postponed. The move has prompted anger amongst the authors of the bill and drug policy activists.
According to the White Noise Movement (WNM), a group campaigning for a softer drug policy and a co-author of the bill, the authors were only notified of the postponement late evening on 27 November, and were given no explanation.
A number of parties, including non-government po
Georgia, a country where every third prisoner is serving time for drugs, may be about to transform its strict drug policy into a far more liberal system. Activists and reformers are hoping that new legislation could change Georgia’s system away from what they call ‘the war against the people’.
On 15 September 2016, a 46-year-old man slashed his own stomach outside the Georgian Government Chancellery, where dozens had gathered to protest the country’s drug policy. He claimed police had terro
Tbilisi City Court has fined Beka Tsikarishvili, who became an icon for drug reform activists in the country, with ₾2,000 ($820) for possession of 69 grammes of cannabis.
