TBILISI: A court in Georgia on Monday handed another prison sentence to former President Mikheil Saakashvili, extending his total imprisonment to 12½ years, in a verdict that he denounced as illegal.
Saakashvili, who served as Georgia’s president from 2004-2013, had previously been sentenced on charges of abuse of power and embezzlement that he and his defence have rejected as politically motivated.
On Monday, the court sentenced him to four years and six months on charges of illegal border crossing. With his previous sentences accumulated, he now has to serve 12 years and six months behind bars.
Saakashvili, speaking by videoconference, dismissed Monday’s verdict as an “absolutely illegal, unjust sentencing of me for crimes I have not committed.”
“They want to annihilate me in prison,” he said. “But no matter what, I will fight till the end.”
Saakashvili, who led the so-called Rose Revolution protests in 2003 that drove his predecessor out of office, enacted a series of ambitious reforms tacking official corruption as president of the South Caucasus nation of 3.7 million. He also presided over a short but fierce war with Russia in 2008 that ended with the humiliating loss of its last footholds in two separatist territories, and he cracked down on protesters who charged that his zeal had mutated into autocracy.
In 2012, Saakashvili’s United National Movement party lost the election to the Georgian Dream party established by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a shadowy billionaire who made his fortune in Russia. Georgian Dream has remained in power ever since, tightening its grip on democratic freedoms and drawing accusations from the opposition of steering the country away from the path toward European Union membership and back into Russia’s sphere of influence.
Saakashvili left for Ukraine in 2013, obtained Ukrainian citizenship and served as a governor of the country’s southern Odesa region from 2015-16. He returned to Georgia in October 2021 to try to bolster opposition forces before nationwide municipal elections and was quickly arrested.
The former president spent much of his time behind bars in a prison hospital after going on a hunger strikes and later claiming that he had been poisoned. He is currently receiving medical treatment at the Vivamedi Clinic, where he is being monitored for several chronic conditions, and his health reportedly worsens periodically, according to the clinic.
Saakashvili’s lawyer, Beka Basilaia, said that Monday’s verdict again showed that Saakashvili is a political prisoner.
“As long as Georgian Dream remains in power, the judiciary is a farce and will make whatever decision it is instructed to,” Basilaia said.
