The Tbilisi Court of Appeal upheld the decision of the court of first instance to refuse ex-president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili to be released from prison for health reasons. According to TASS, Saakashvili’s comrade-in-arms Ekaterina Kherkheulidze wrote about this on the social network.
“The Court of Appeal considered the case of Mikheil Saakashvili in absentia and upheld the decision of the court of first instance,” Kherkheulidze wrote.
The Tbilisi Court of Appeal later substantiated its decision by the fact that after studying the materials of the case, it had no grounds to satisfy the complaint of Saakashvili’s lawyers.
“The Court of Appeal, on the basis of Article 291 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Georgia, considered in absentia the complaint of Shalva Khachapuridze, Zurab Vanishvili and Valeryan Gelbakhiani, defending the interests of the convicted Mikheil Saakashvili, and as a result of examining the materials/information of the case, considered that there were no legal grounds to satisfy the above complaint,” reads in the court’s announcement.
On February 6 this year, the Tbilisi City Court rejected the request of the ex-president’s lawyers for his release on health grounds. During more than ten meetings, doctors and experts, including foreign ones, spoke as witnesses, who stated that the former head of state had many diseases. The position of the Georgian authorities is that Saakashvili is simulating.
Saakashvili secretly arrived in Georgia the day before the municipal elections in October 2021, after which he was arrested and placed in a prison in the city of Rustavi. He went on a hunger strike, calling himself a political prisoner. After the deterioration of the health of the former president, he was transferred to a prison hospital, and later to a military hospital. In December 2021, Saakashvili continued to serve his sentence in a prison in Rustavi, but in May 2022 he was taken to the Vivamed private clinic in Tbilisi, where he remains to this day.
Source: Rosbalt
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