The European Court of Human Rights has no reason to doubt the justice of the criminal proceedings against the former president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili.
This is stated in the decision on the case "Saakashvili vs Georgia", applications No. 6232/20 and No. 22394/20.
The case concerns two separate criminal proceedings initiated against the Georgian ex-president.
The first group of proceedings refers to an attack on a member of parliament in 2005, and the second refers to the pardon in 2008 of four former high-ranking officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs who were convicted of murder.
Both hearings came as the newly formed government officially announced in 2012 that investigating past crimes would be its priority.
The ECtHR unanimously ruled that the rights to a fair trial, to the presence and questioning of witnesses under the European Convention on Human Rights were not violated.
The court decided by five votes to two that Georgia did not violate Article 7 of the European Convention (no punishment without law).
"Mr. Saakashvili could reasonably foresee, under the specific circumstances of the case, that the use of his pardon power to pervert the course of justice in a murder case would lead to criminal liability," the court said in a statement.
The ECtHR also dismissed as inadmissible the complaints of Mikheil Saakashvili under Article 18 of the European Convention (Limits of the Application of Restrictions of Rights), because he did not substantiate his claim about the presence of an ulterior motive — preventing his participation in Georgian politics — behind his criminal prosecution.
"The court took into account that the charges brought against Mr. Saakashvili were serious and well-founded, that there was a significant amount of both direct and agreed-upon circumstantial evidence against him in the case file," the statement added.
- Mikheil Saakashvili was the president of Georgia from 2004 to 2013. He renounced his Georgian citizenship in 2013 and became a citizen of Ukraine. In 2021, he returned to Georgia, where he was arrested, because by that time Saakashvili had been convicted in absentia. Now the ex-president is in prison.