The Zugdidi City Court has sentenced activist Rosto Zarandia to five days of administrative arrest over a Facebook comment in which he called the Zugdidi City Hall’s spokesperson a goose.
Zarandia made the comment about Magdalena Todua on a post commemorating the Soviet Union’s brutal crackdown on a pro-independence protest on 9 April 1989.
On Wednesday, he published a post on Facebook describing an overnight commemoration held by activists near the 9 April memorial in Zugdidi, where police violently dispersed activists, injuring several, in order to clear the area for an official commemoration of the event by government officials.
He said he left several comments about this on posts by the city hall about the official commemorations, but that the administration kept deleting them.
One of the comments he left was addressed to Todua, partially written in Mingrelian.
‘You are deleting these comments now, you gave them the right to beat us so you could post this post, you goose!’ the comment read. ‘You are fabricating reality, you are rigging elections, you are a criminal Magdalena Todua’.
‘Goose’ is often used in Georgian as an insult indicating that someone is silly.
Another Zugdidi activist, Mariam Sitchinava, published part of the letter written by Todua accusing Zarandia of ‘threatening and insulting’ her and citing this comment.
‘I believe that Rosto Zarandia’s actions towards me are violent. They contain signs of a crime and require immediate reaction’, she wrote, demanding a probe into the ‘threat and psychological pressure’ against her.
Zarandia has been previously fined ₾3,000 ($1,100) several times for spraypaining walls with messages in support of jailed journalist and founder of Batumelebi and Netgazeti, Mzia Amaghlobeli, who is facing up to seven years in jail for slapping Batumi Police Chief Irakli Dgebuadze.
Zarandia is not the first person to have been remanded to administrative detention or to be given a fine for comments or posts on Facebook. Georgian Dream adopted new legislative amendments in February increasing administrative detention periods for attacking officials and police, including with verbal insults and insults made on social media. Over 20 people have been either fined or sentenced to administrative detention for Facebook posts up as of early July.
