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Human Rights Center Addresses the Parliament with a Legislative Proposal

July 24, 2015
 
Natia Gogolashvili

Representatives of Human Rights Center talk about unfair attitude towards female prisoners. According to the human rights defenders, the formation of new provision of the article 260 of Criminal Code of Georgia provides separation of sale of narcotics from purchasing, possessing and transferring. They welcome this fact; however, the change did not affect the article 262 of CC, which instilled feeling of injustice and protest in female convicts. 

The article 262 of the Criminal Code of Georgia is about smuggling or illegal exporting and transiting narcotics, its analogs, precursors or new psychotropic substances to/from Georgia. 

According to the head of legal department of Human Rights Center, Tamar Avaliani, in 2012, when prisoners were pardoned and released under article 260, it was logical for amnesty to affect the article 262 as well. However, this did not happen. 

“The convicts who were sentenced under the articles 260 and 262 of the Criminal Code of Georgia, during the large-scale amnesty in 2012, were released only from the article 260 and their sentences under the article 262 were decreased only to 1/3. We are talking about purchasing and possessing the narcotics on the one side and on the other side about the article 262 - smuggling drugs into Georgia, which is an additional article to purchasing-possessing. At the time when they were releasing them under article 260 of CC, they should have released them from the article 262 as well, which was not included in the amnesty. This, in our opinion, is wrong. We requested the liberal attitude to impact on the article 262 too as an amnesty,”- said Tamar Avaliani.

According to Tamar Avaliani, the results of the monitoring of prison N5 revealed that a major part of female prisoners were convicted for drug related crimes. Therefore, this is systematic and very current problem. According to the lawyer, there are up to 20 convicts, who were released from the article 260 (whose cases did not include selling), but now are serving their sentence under the article 262 of CC, which is unfair. 

A fair dissatisfaction of female prisoners is caused by the fact that the President and the Pardon Commission refuses to pardon the prisoners who had served more than half of their sentences based on article 262 of CC, before the Parliamentary Elections. 

“It has been outlined that female prisoners, who were convicted under article 262 of CC before year 2012, are sentenced with inadequately long imprisonment, while the court issues more lenient sentences to those who are being convicted after 2012 elections under the same article. For the comparison, if before they were sentenced to 20-30 years or even life imprisonment by agglomeration of sentences, now the court uses 3-4 years or maximum 7-8 years of imprisonment. There are cases when new prisoners were affected by early release or pardoning. The old prisoners are still serving their sentences. As long as there is no other effective mechanism, Human Rights Center addressed the Pardon Commission to take into account this circumstance and the President to pardon the old prisoners, but working in this direction has not proved to be effective. Our beneficiaries were not even pardoned,”- said the executive director of Human Rights Center Aleko Tskitishvili.

On July 3, the representatives of Human Rights Center held a press conference on this issue. They spread the address of Human Rights Center about discriminatory conditions of one part of female prisoners on the press conference. According to the human rights’ defenders, Human Rights Center is planning in nearest future to address the Parliament with the legislative proposal. The aim of the legislative proposal is to ensure full amnesty for those prisoners who were convicted during 2006-2012, who had committed the drug related crime for the first time and had no aim of selling in their cases. 

Human Rights Center, with the financial support of the Bulgarian Embassy, is conducting a project “Monitoring Condition of Female and Juvenile Prisoners in Georgia”. The aim of the project is to discover the existing problems in female and juvenile prisons and contribute to improvement of the conditions. Under this project, with the partnership of the Public Defender of Georgia, Human Rights Center’s observers are providing planned and unplanned visits to the penitentiary facilities of female and juvenile prisoners.

This article was published within the frameworks of the project Monitoring State of Women and Juvenile Prisoners in Georgia which is implemented by Human Rights Center in partnership with Office of Public Defender of Georgia, by the financial support of Embassy of Bulgaria.

The article does not necessarily reflect the views of the donor. Human Rights Center bears sole responsibility for the content of the report.

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