New Statistics Show Who Is Responsible for Human Rights Abuses in Georgia
The Human Rights Information and Documentation Centre (HRIDC) recently completed a project categorizing the various human rights abuses in Georgia. The project clearly demonstrates the types of abuse that are most common, who the victims are and who must be held responsible for these human rights violations.
The results show that the most frequent types of abuse in Georgia are; physical assaults, acts of intimidation, false arrests, torture (including cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment) and the authorities not fulfilling their required legal duties – such as providing adequate education, housing or drinking water.
The victims of abuse are mainly ‘civilians’, although prisoners and those involved in the media, such as journalists, stand out as two groups who suffer more frequent abuse than any other defined group within the population.
The police, prison officials and the national government are most responsible for human rights violations in Georgia.
Information regarding human rights abuses is received by HRIDC in the form of articles from news agencies and from its own regional journalists, who themselves write articles. The project took a sample of 391 news articles from the HRIDC site (http://www.humanrights.ge/eng/news.shtml), posted between the 23rd December 2003 and 10th May 2006. These articles were then broken down and categorized to come to the above conclusions.
HRIDC is based in Tbilisi and its regional journalists are located in the following regions: Adjaria (Batumi), Kakheti (in Gurjani, Telavi, Sagarejo), Samegrelo-Zemo Svateni (Zugdidi) and Shida Kartli (Gori). HRIDC has no representatives in the other regions, although it occasionally receives articles from news agencies concerning these regions.
Jack Ziebell, who conducted the statistics project with HRIDC, stated, “The conclusions that can be drawn from the data confirm what the NGO community already believes to be the case. Journalists clearly suffer from a great deal of intimidation and prisoners are frequently subject to torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Despite the reforms implemented by the current government, it appears that those responsible for enforcing the laws of Georgia are currently breaking many of them.”
HRIDC calls upon the government to ensure that all human rights violations are properly investigated and dealt with – no matter who is responsible for committing such abuses. The law enforcement community has made great improvements over recent years, but impartial institutional safeguards must be created and supported to ensure these improvements are not lost.
The methodology and conclusions of the project, as well as the data and charts in MS Excel format can be downloaded at:
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