“It was fate that a few hours after the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling Saakashvili (former president of Georgia) a person in exile, the ECHR delivered a ruling saying that Mikheil Saakashvili was the president of the Gulag,” Georgian Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili told the media outlets.

According to him, the Strasbourg court delivered a stronger judgement of the European Parliament’s resolution on Mikheil Saakashvili, which labelled the former president “a person in exile who was returning to his homeland, but not the law but a personal vendetta was executed against him,” than any political assessment. The European Court of Human Rights issued a ruling effectively saying that Mikheil Saakashvili was the president of the Gulag, “who created a system where people were oppressed, tortured, and that was systematic.”

“With this judgement, the ECHR demonstrated once more what was going on. This judgement precisely depicts the realities of torture that our society is aware of, and this is our past. It is history that a certain group of politicians wants us to rewrite when they suggest we should label the punishment of the criminal a personal vendetta. It is an attempt to portray a deception as fact when we are pushed to reassess and rewrite our history, to forget and erase from our memory the system Mikheil Saakashvili built,” Papuashvili remarked.

On February 16, 2023, the European Court of Human Rights published its judgment in the case Ochigava v. Georgia, based on which the torture and ill-treatment of prisoners in Georgian penitentiary institutions until 2012 was a widespread practice.