Kyiv • UNN
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that there was no violation of his rights in the criminal proceedings against Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia, finding the charges to be substantiated and the trial to be fair.
The European Court of Human Rights has stated that there is no reason to doubt the fairness of the criminal proceedings against former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. This is stated in the statement of the ECHR, reports UNN.
Details
Reportedly, the case of Saakashvili v. Georgia (Nos. 6232/20 and 22394/20) concerned two separate groups of criminal proceedings initiated against Mikheil Saakashvili.
The first set of proceedings concerned the 2005 attack on a member of parliament, and the second concerned his 2008 pardon of four former high-ranking Interior Ministry officials convicted of murder.
The ECHR said in a statement that both proceedings took place after the newly formed government officially announced in 2012 that investigating past crimes would be a key priority.
In today's decision in this case, the European Court of Human Rights:
Saakashvili could have reasonably foreseen, given the specific circumstances of the case, that the use of his pardon powers to pervert the course of justice in the murder case would lead to his criminal liability under Georgian law
The Court also rejected as inadmissible Saakashvili's complaints under Article 18 (restrictions on the use of restrictions on rights) of the Convention. The ECtHR found that Saakashvili had not substantiated his claim that there was an ulterior motive behind his persecution - to prevent him from participating in Georgian politics.
In this regard, the court took into account that the charges against Saakashvili were serious and substantiated, that the case file contained a significant amount of both direct and circumstantial evidence against him, that the domestic courts had conducted a fully adversarial process in which his lawyer had been able to examine all the main witnesses and otherwise challenge the evidence against him, and that, above all, the court decisions had been duly reasoned