Tbilisi City Court has jailed opposition leader Nika Melia and a retired opposition figure, GIvi Targamadze, for failing to appear before a parliamentary commission created to investigate the opposition.
Nika Melia, the cofounder of the opposition Ahali party, was sentenced to eight months, while former United National Movement (UNM) MP Givi Targamadze received seven months. Both verdicts were announced a few hours apart on Friday.
Melia was already in pretrial detention at the time of his sentencing for refusing to pay the bail set by the court in the same case. He did not attend Friday’s court hearing.
Targamadze, who paid his bail, had remained free until now. He also did not attend the hearing; instead, he went to the police station near his home, where he was handcuffed after the verdict was announced in the courtroom.
‘We will inevitably win. In my view, it will happen sooner than I previously thought’, added Targamadze as he arrived at the police station, describing the Georgian Dream government as an ‘openly occupational regime’.
Targamadze retired from politics in 2021, after having served as a UNM MP during its time in power and after Georgian Dream defeated them in 2012. He later joined European Georgia, a party that split off from the UNM, which he left in 2021.
Targamadze has been wanted by Russia since 2013 on charges of attempting to organise mass unrest in Moscow.
In October 2016, his car was blown up in central Tbilisi. Targamadze and his driver, who were there, survived. Later, the politician claimed that the explosives had been set jointly by Georgian and Russian security services. Georgia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs only announced an arrest of a suspect linked to the bombing in 2024.
On Friday, Targamadze suggested that his detention was ‘an order of Russia’.
A total of eight people have been detained for failing to appear before Georgian Dream’s parliamentary commission, which targets the opposition. Of those, six have already been sentenced, while two — another leader of the Ahali party, Nika Gvaramia, and former Defence Minister Irakli Okruashvili — are in pretrial detention awaiting their verdicts.
Before Targamadze and Melia, Giorgi Vashadze, leader of the Strategy Aghmashenebeli party, was sentenced to seven months on Tuesday.
Previously, on Monday, the court sentenced Girchi — More Freedom leader Zurab Japaridze to seven months in prison on the same charges. Just a few hours later, Lelo leaders Mamuka Khazaradze and Badri Japaridze were given eight months each.
The sentences also included a ban from holding public office for two years.
Georgia’s fifth president Salome Zourabichvili previously described the arrest of opposition politicians as a ‘sign of weakness’ from the government and the beginning of its end.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze once again attacked the opposition with conspiratorial rhetoric, referring to the detainees as ‘agents’ of the ‘deep state’.
The anti-UNM commission
The commission was set up in February ostensibly to investigate the UNM’s time in power, following repeated pledges by Georgian Dream to punish the formerly ruling party.
Initially, its mandate was limited to the UNM’s years in government (2003–2012), but it was later expanded to cover the period up to the present day — effectively giving Georgian Dream free reign to target virtually any opposition figure.
Numerous opposition figures have boycotted the commission, refusing to recognise its legitimacy, as well as that of the current parliament, which has also been boycotted by major opposition parties following the disputed 2024 parliamentary elections.
Criminal cases were launched against those who refused to attend the commission’s hearings — if found guilty, those charged could be fined or sentenced to up to a year in prison. They could also be banned from holding public office or engaging in certain activities for up to three years.
On Monday, during an interview with the pro-government TV channel Rustavi 2, the commission chair, Georgian Dream MP Tea Tsulukiani, did not rule out filing a second complaint against the detained opposition politicians.
According to her, the commission has summoned Khazaradze and Gvaramia for questioning again, and if they do not participate from prison, ‘it would probably come as no surprise to anyone if we are obliged to send this second failure-to-appear case back to the Prosecutor’s Office’.
Georgian Dream has openly declared that it intends to use the findings of the parliamentary commission to file a case with the Constitutional Court seeking to ban the country’s main opposition parties — a promise the ruling party made to its voters ahead of the 2024 elections.
The ruling party has maintained that all major opposition groups operating in the country are satellites of the UNM and should no longer be allowed to exist.
Mikheil Gvadzabia
