“We chose to protest in the street over a life of comfort, to fight for our country’s freedom, its dignity, its honour. There is no other way, and that is precisely what thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are doing when they come out onto the streets every single day,” declared Irakli Nadiradze, a member of the United National Movement arrested in connection with the October 4 case, during his closing statement at trial.

He also stressed that standing at protests is not an end in itself.

“Do you genuinely believe that people are being paid to participate in demonstrations? Does anyone truly believe that we prefer standing at protests to being with our families, our children, doing the work we love? Or do you think that we prefer paying fines incurred at demonstrations to bringing a basic income home to our households? The fee for a single Paata Burchuladze concert could well exceed what the prosecutors, taken together, earn in an entire year. Yet we chose to forgo that comfortable life in favour of standing in the street, fighting for our country’s freedom, dignity, and justice. There is no other way, and that is true of the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who come out onto the streets every day. Standing at protests is not our end goal. It is not our hobby, it is not a passion, and no one would so much as utter the words ‘peaceful revolution’ if this country had a government that listened, that submitted to the will and the choice of its people,” Nadiraze declared.

Nadiradze also spoke to the question of how power ought to change hands in a democratic country.

“The prosecutor asked me how the government should change. In a normal, civilised, democratic country, power should change through elections. For that to happen, transparent, fair, and democratic elections must be held. When a government is capable of acknowledging defeat and peacefully transferring power to the winning side, that is when the people will no longer need to take to the streets, and no one will need to invoke the right of uprising or ‘peaceful revolution’ granted to them under international law. The last time power changed hands peacefully was on October 1, 2012. Within an hour of the election results being announced, Mikheil Saakashvili came forward and conceded defeat, even though Georgian Dream had come to power by the most squalid of means.

Although Misha knew full well who was coming to power and had been warning the public about it long in advance, Saakashvili abandoned power in an absolutely peaceful and unconditional manner. Why? Because that is how true leaders behave, leaders who love their people and their country,” Nadiradze said.

Furthermore, as Nadiradze noted in his closing statement, it had been utterly inconceivable to him that the detention of people near the Presidential Palace would be treated as a criminal matter rather than an administrative one.

“When I saw that the fence had been cut and damaged, it was plain that the people who had crossed over before our arrival were being hunted down for arrest. I entered entirely deliberately, with bare hands, without any form of violence, for one sole purpose — to be arrested alongside them. Only, in all honesty, it was inconceivable to me that those people, and we ourselves, would be detained under criminal law rather than administrative procedure. There had been many protests before this. I have witnessed and participated in many of them. I have seen far worse scenes than this, and yet those people had never been detained by anything other than administrative means. That is how it should have happened this time as well,” Nadiradze concluded.