Opinion | Saving Georgia’s judiciary requires an examination of the past
Georgia does not need to look to the past for a supposed golden age of judicial independence, but to instead focus on building something sustainable.
As Georgia’s courts hand down decisions that penalise protesters, sideline critics, and shield those in power, one conclusion becomes difficult to avoid: the judiciary is not acting as a brake on authoritarian drift. It is helping to implement it.
As this fact becomes increasingly apparent, a familiar debate is resurfacing. Namely, some legal scholars argue that Georgia’s judiciary was comparatively ‘more free’ during Eduard Shevardnadze’s presidency than under Mikheil Saakashvili. The 1990s, they suggest, were marked by at least partial independence, whereas the post-2004 period brought tighter executive control.
It is an attractive narrative. It suggests decline; it suggests that something once existed and was later dismantled. But it risks misunderstanding the deeper problem — that fragmentation is not independence.
In an influential analysis of Georgia’s judicial evolution, legal researchers Jim Moliterno, Sopho Verdzeuli, and Irakli Kordzakhia trace how the courts moved through phases of dispersed authority, executive dominance, and, later, consolidation within judicial governance bodies. In that framework, the Shevardnadze era appears relatively less controlled and therefore ‘partially independent’.
Yet independence cannot be measured by the mere absence of centralised political control.
The judiciary of the 1990s functioned in a weak and fragmented state: corruption was widespread and informal networks often outweighed formal law. Judges navigated uncertainty through personal ties and tactical accommodation. Political authority was dispersed, but so was accountability.
Because they were not so tightly coordinated from above, courts sometimes acted unpredictably. But unpredictability born of institutional weakness is not the same as autonomy grounded in enforceable guarantees.
True judicial independence requires more than the absence of control. It requires secure tenure, protection from informal pressure, transparent appointments, and — crucially — the capacity to constrain political power even when doing so is costly.
Shota Kincha
Those foundations were not firmly in place in the 1990s.
This distinction matters because Georgia’s legal development has repeatedly followed a similar trajectory. Political upheavals — whether in the early 1990s, after the Rose Revolution, or in subsequent transitions — have been framed as moments of democratic rebirth, with institutional reform following each rupture. Yet structural redesign has often outpaced the slow construction of durable constraints.
Political change has tended to reshape the judiciary without embedding it in a stable, impersonal framework that binds those in power. The courts have adapted to new political configurations, but they have not become structurally insulated from them. Institutional theory helps explain why.
Systems can operate around elite bargains rather than impersonal rules. In such arrangements, law stabilises power relations rather than limiting them. Fragmentation among elites does not automatically produce autonomy for institutions caught between them.
Georgia’s experience fits this pattern. In the 1990s, control was dispersed. After 2004, it became more centralised. But neither configuration produced a judiciary capable of acting as a consistent check on power. The shift was not from independence to subordination. It was from fragmentation to consolidation.
Today’s authoritarian enforcement of law is more coherent and more systematic than in the past. Judges are not merely passive bystanders; they are active participants in decisions that weaken democratic space.
If we romanticise the Shevardnadze era as a time of partial autonomy, we risk framing the current crisis as a fall from an earlier equilibrium. Reform then becomes a question of restoration.
Davit Zedelashvili
But if independence was never deeply institutionalised, the challenge is far more fundamental.
Georgia does not need to recover a lost golden age of judicial freedom. It needs to build, for the first time, a judiciary embedded in enforceable rules that bind political actors regardless of who governs.
That means confronting uncomfortable truths. It means acknowledging that courts have long operated within political structures rather than above them. And it means recognising that administrative reform, constitutional amendments, or changes in personnel will not be enough if the underlying logic remains intact.
Without structural insulation and credible constraints, the judiciary will continue to mirror the dominant political order — whether fragmented or consolidated.
The law cannot restrain power if it is shaped by it.
Understanding this is not about nostalgia or partisan blame. It is about clarity. And without clarity about the past, any future of judicial reform will once again be built on illusions.
