Judge of the Tbilisi City Court Giorgi Arevadze did not satisfy the request of the lawyers of the ex-president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili to transfer their client to the Berlin clinic “Charite” for the treatment of a number of psychiatric and endocrinological diseases.
Judge Arevadze called the lawyers’ request groundless. Thus, he agreed with the arguments of the Department for the Execution of Punishments that the testimonies of doctors hired by the Saakashvili family, as well as his associates in the opposition United National Movement (UNM) party, about the allegedly serious illness of the former president “are not credible” and the third president Georgia is “trying to avoid punishment” – a six-year prison term for orchestrating the 2005 beating of opposition MP and businessman Valery Gelashvili, who insulted the president’s wife, Sandra Roelofs, in a newspaper interview.
Before the court’s verdict was announced, ex-president’s lawyer Shalva Khachapuridze told reporters that if the decision was in favor of the convict, “a special medical plane would immediately fly out of Poland and transport Mikheil Saakashvili to Berlin today.”
After the verdict of the Tbilisi City Court is announced, the lawyers plan to apply to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg with a request to make an “urgent decision” on “saving the life of Mikheil Saakashvili.”
Meanwhile, UNM chairman Levan Khabeishvili warned that as early as Tuesday, “Saakashvili’s party” would begin protests “to free Georgia’s national hero Mikheil Saakashvili from the captivity of Georgian henchmen of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.”