The former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili was fairly convicted of abuses of power for ordering the beating of an opposition MP and pardoning four murderers, human rights judges in Strasbourg have ruled.
Saakashvili, who was president of Georgia from 2004 to 2013, was said by the European court of human rights on Thursday to have failed to show he had been unfairly treated in his trials in 2018.
The court found there were credible witnesses in both proceedings, and that his argument that the presidential power of clemency was unlimited “could be dangerous and encourage corruption”.
The judgment read: “The authorities’ honest desire was to bring the applicant to justice for his wrongdoing and … in the absence of sufficient evidence to the contrary, the allegation of an ulterior motive is unsubstantiated.”
Two of the seven judges gave dissenting opinions but the ruling will be a blow for Saakashvili’s hopes of release from jail in Georgia, where he has been detained since he returned to the country in 2021.
Saakashvili remains the prime ministerial candidate for the United National Movement party that he founded and which remains today the largest opposition group in Georgia’s parliament. He led the non-violent Rose revolution that brought an end two decades ago to the administration of the president Eduard Shevardnadze, a former Soviet minister of foreign affairs.
By the time Saakashvili’s term as president had ended in 2013, his administration was deeply unpopular, with opposition parties claiming he had become authoritarian.
When the new government was elected, led by politicians from the Georgian Dream party, which continues to govern the country, it declared that investigating the wrongdoings of the past would be a priority.
Saakashvili was convicted in absentia in 2018 over an attack in July 2005 on a member of parliament who was forced out of his car at a traffic light by six armed men, who beat him with their rifle butts. Saakashvili was found to have ordered the riot police to carry out the attack in reprisal for an offensive interview the MP had given to a newspaper about him and his wife.
A former speaker of the Georgian parliament recalled to the court a conversation with Saakashvili after the attack in which he allegedly said: “Doesn’t he [the MP] deserve to be duffed up?”
A second key witness, the head of the riot police at the time, claimed the president had warmly thanked him at an official event for the “successful” operation against the MP.
The second set of proceedings in front of the ECHR concerned Saakashvili’s granting of a pardon in 2008 to four former high-ranking officers of the interior ministry who had been convicted of killing a young man for insulting some of their colleagues in a Tbilisi cafe. He was convicted of abuse of power, which was confirmed on appeal.
The Georgian court found that Saakashvili had granted the pardon because he had been anxious about the damage that full disclosure of all the details could do to his political team.
The judges in Strasbourg ruled that “the charges brought against [him] had been serious and well-founded, [and] that there had been a significant body of both direct and concordant circumstantial evidence against him”.
