According to the information at our disposal, employees of the Investigation Service of the Ministry of Finance of Georgia detained various officials of the Tbilisi City Hall and members of the majority of the City Council (Sakrebulo) in the morning hours of June 27, 2013.
According to the detainees, a part of them were transferred to the building of the Investigation Service of the Ministry of Finance. A part of the detainees were handcuffed upon detention (or several minutes after the detention), while a part of them were handcuffed after being transferred to the building.
It should be noted that Mamuka Akhvlediani (the First Deputy Head of the City Council) was driven around Tbilisi’s streets for almost an hour and was later released directly from the vehicle.
As the detainees declare, the employees of the Investigation Service did not explain to them at the time of detention what crime they were indicted for, and they failed to acquaint them with their basic rights.
According to them, after the employees of the Investigation Service had taken them to the Investigation Service building, they started drawing up protocols on detention and explained to a part of them that they were indicted for the crime provided for in Article 182 of the Criminal Code of Georgia, though after the persons who had drawn up the protocols received an instruction, presumably from their superiors, they discontinued the detention procedure and destroyed the documents they had drawn up.
As the detainees declare, after this, the employees of the Investigation Service formally drew up protocols on their interrogation as witnesses in which they simply indicated the detainees’ demographic data and work experience.
Later, all the detainees were released without any additional explanations, while the official representatives of the Investigation Service assessed their stay at the Investigation Service building as “bringing of witnesses”, not as detention.
The Georgian Democratic Initiative believes that the officials of the Investigation Service have grossly violated the right to inviolability of freedom guaranteed by the Constitution.
When deliberating on the contents of Article 18 of the Constitution of Georgia (which protects the right to inviolability of freedom), the Constitutional Court of Georgia noted that “a person can be considered as detained from the moment a person specially authorized to detain him/her… restricts the freedom guaranteed by the Constitution of Georgia… the rights should be explained to the detainee upon his/her detention, the demand for the assistance of counsel should be satisfied within as reasonable a term as possible.”
Paragraph 2 of Article 170 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of Georgia has identical contents. According to this paragraph, “A person shall be considered as detained from the moment his/her freedom of movement is restricted.” According to the same norm, “A person shall be considered as indicted from the moment of his/her detention.” According to the Georgian legislation, “The official who detains a person is obliged to communicate this to the detainee in an understandable form, explain what crime he/she is indicted for, and notify that he/she has the right to counsel, the right to remain silent, the right to refrain from answering questions, and the right not to incriminate oneself, and that everything he/she says may be used against him/her in court.”
It is a fact that the law enforcement body restricted the “right of free movement” of all the aforementioned persons and we should consider them as detainees according to the Georgian legislation, and the employees of the investigatory body detained them without a judicial act.
The argument brought forward by the Investigation Service of the Ministry of Finance of Georgia that the aforementioned persons were taken to the investigatory body as witnesses lacks credibility. According to the Georgian legislation, bringing a witness to an investigatory body under coercion requires corresponding grounds and a judge’s order, and information about the existence of such an act was neither communicated to the detainees nor disseminated by the investigatory body.
Accordingly, we believe that the detention of the aforementioned persons had an unlawful character and contained signs of crime provided for in Article 147 of the Criminal Code of Georgia, and it is necessary to launch an investigation into the aforementioned fact and hold the persons who took part in and were responsible for the detention to account.
