Supreme Court of Georgia

The Supreme Court Reacted on the Comments Made by Georgian Foreign Minister

Published: 03/26/2014

The Supreme Court reacts on the comments made by Georgian Foreign Minister Mrs. Maia Panjikidze on March 24, 2014, during the visit in The Hague and which was followed the statement of the U.S. Department of State expressing concern over decision to summon ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili for questioning.

Georgian Foreign Minister said, that “it is very well known in the United States how weak the Georgian law enforcement agencies were; how weak the judiciary was, which was delivering guilty verdicts in almost 99% of cases”.

The Court declares that such a statement by the Foreign Minister is incompetent and it also serves to discredit the image of the judiciary.

High officials of the Judiciary always stated that the way of the reforms was difficult with many obstacles, but the goal to which aspired Georgian Judiciary was to create the independent and impartial court system. Increase the quality of judicial independence is the dynamic process and the judiciary should never be satisfied with the achieved results.

As for the establishment of quality of independence index of the judiciary by the number of guilty verdicts:

Statistics on guilty and acquittal verdicts delivered by Georgian Courts have been published many times and all the interested parties may find it on the Courts website. Judging on the basis of the examples of several European countries, the number of guilty verdicts cannot be directly proportional to the independence of the judiciary.

Data for the period 2011-2012, in Finland acquittal verdicts were only 1.6%, in France - 3.6%, in the UK - 3.7%, in Latvia and Lithuania - 0.8% and 1.8%, and in Japan only 0.4%.

The Judiciary is urging everyone, including Government representatives, to be more careful and prudent while making the allegations towards the administration of justice. The criticism is acceptable, but it should not be based on ill-founded and incompetent accusations.