Georgian opposition parties have announced plans to contact the authorities in France to investigate Georgian Dream founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, who is believed to hold both French and Georgian citizenships.
Representatives of the newly established Opposition Alliance said on Monday that they ‘take responsibility’ for the implementation of specific recommendations left by the OSCE in its damning report on Georgia’s democratic backsliding.
Among those was a recommendation for OSCE member states to file lawsuits against members of the ruling Georgian Dream party at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The report noted a ‘marked democratic backsliding’ in Georgia, a ‘pattern of violence and other abuses’ against dissent ‘sometimes reaching the threshold of torture’, often met with ‘near-total impunity for the perpetrators’.
It was commissioned under the organisation’s Moscow Mechanism, which is meant to identify and tackle human rights abuses across the OSCE’s member states.
Mikheil Gvadzabia
‘The Moscow Mechanism report has fundamentally changed the situation. This is an entirely new international reality’, said Giga Lemonjava, a member of the opposition party Droa, adding that ‘the Opposition Alliance has new responsibilities in this reality’.
The alliance presented its plans within the framework of the four recommendations given to the international community by the report’s author.
One such recommendation was to facilitate the involvement of UN special procedures in protecting and promoting human rights in Georgia, and to consider establishing a country office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
According to the parties, they have already begun ‘active coordination’ with the commissioner to enable the implementation of their mandate in Georgia.
‘The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has the authority to inspect the situation on the ground’, Lemonjava added.
The alliance also focused on the recommendation that perpetrators of torture and inhumane treatment and their superiors be brought to justice in national courts, wherever possible, ‘including through invoking universal jurisdiction’.
Universal jurisdiction is a principle of international law allowing national courts to prosecute individuals for specific crimes regardless of where the crime occurred or the nationality of the perpetrator or victim.
The alliance specifically emphasised France in this regard, noting that Ivanishvili ‘is a French citizen’.
‘We are beginning very active communication with French investigative authorities, including the Prosecutor’s Office, so that an investigation against Ivanishvili regarding systemic torture and the use of chemical weapons can be initiated at the national level, in individual countries, including France’, they said.
The parties also highlighted the recommendation in which the report suggested that states party to the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention consider requesting the Executive Council of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to clarify the ‘alleged use of chemical weapons by Georgian authorities’.
Mikheil Gvadzabia
According to the alliance, since the authorities ‘will not engage in this cooperation’, they themselves will begin coordinating with international partners to ‘approach the OPCW so that it can initiate an investigation in accordance with its regulations’.
The opposition also placed emphasis on a recommendation which suggested that states party to the Rome Statute consider referring the situation in Georgia to the ICC. That includes cases of ‘political persecution, torture, and other inhumane acts’.
‘We will do everything to ensure that Ivanishvili ends up as many other autocrats and bloody dictators have — on the defendant’s bench at the Hague tribunal’, they said.
Both Georgian Dream and their allies dismissed the OSCE report as baseless, with one leading Georgian Dream MP saying that the report would remain a ‘hollow document’.
International criticism of the authorities in Georgia have grown in recent years in response to the ruling party’s tightened policies toward dissent.
Against this backdrop, Georgia’s relations have sharply deteriorated with its long-time international partners, including the EU.
