Georgia in Human Rights Watch World Report

Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2010, released on January 20, overviews major human rights trends in Georgia for last year mainly related to opposition’s street protest rallies, police, criminal justice system and media freedom.

A section of the voluminous report, which concerns Georgia, says that although the authorities “tolerated protracted protests” by the opposition parties in April-July, 2009, police used excessive force in number of cases and in this regard the report gives brief accounts of May 6 and June 15 incidents outside the Tbilisi police headquarters.

The report also notes on the series of incidents in April and early May involving attacks by unidentified men in civilian clothes, often armed with rubber truncheons and wearing masks, beating and threatening a number of individual demonstrators leaving protests at night.

“The authorities opened over 50 individual cases, but failed to meaningfully investigate — suggesting acquiescence or support for such attacks,” the report says.

Human Rights Watch said that the Georgian Parliament in July passed “regressive amendments” to the administrative code increasing administrative detention, including for minor hooliganism and defying police orders, from 30 to 90 days.

This measure, which apparently was made in response to the street protest rallies, “appears excessive given that pretrial detention for criminal charges is only 60 days,” according to Human Rights Watch.

The report also notes that despite construction of new prisons and several presidential pardons, problem related with prison overcrowding still persists.

“Although official statistics showed a decrease in the use of pretrial detention, the total number of prisoners increased to 19,504 by June 2009, a more than 50% increase since 2006. The frequent use of consecutive custodial sentencing is largely responsible for this increase,” the report reads.

On media freedom, the report notes mixed environment “with diverse print media, but nationwide television broadcasting limited to the state-owned public broadcaster and pro-government Rustavi 2 and Imedi stations.” The report also says that lack of transparency of media ownership remains a concern.

According to the report more than a year after the August 2008 war “impunity for violations of international humanitarian law by all sides” still remains.

The report says that although the United States and European Union deepened their engagement and financial support of Georgia, they “failed to make full use of their leverage to ensure meaningful human rights improvements.”

/Georgian Times/