In this report by the Council of Europe's (CoE) Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights on the abuse of pretrial detention in States Parties to the European Convention on Human Rights in September 2015, states:
"At the same time, an astonishing number of individual examples of selective and presumably abusive use of pretrial detention against political opponents [in Georgia] show that the new authorities appear not to have resisted the temptation to make use of existing law-enforcement mechanisms to harass and weaken the opposition."
"As a matter of fact, a large number of former officials are either in pretrial detention or wanted for arrest, beginning with former President Mikheil Saakashvili, former Prime Minister Ivane Merabishvili, former Justice Minister Zurab Adeishvili, Former Mayor of Tbilisi and UNM election campaign manager Giorgi Ugulava, former Defense Minister Davit Kezerashvili, former Health, Labour and Social Affairs Minister Zurab Tchiaberashvili, former Defense and Interior Minister Bachana Akhalaia, as well as his brother David Akhalaia, former head of the Interior Ministry’s Constitutional Department."
"In April 2015, I received a list of 24 former senior officials who have been prosecuted by the new authorities."
"I do not assert that all the former UNM leaders are innocent, and I certainly do not favour impunity for politicians who commit crimes whilst in office. But I find it hard to imagine that practically the whole of the former Georgian Government are criminals. In fact, for some of the above-mentioned persons, extradition requests were denied by judicial authorities in Ukraine (Mr Saakashvili), France (Mr Kezerashvili) and Greece (Mr Davit Akhalaia), because they considered the extradition requests as politically motivated."
