GYLA: Number of Unverified Court Verdicts Has Increased

Lado Bitchashvili, Shida Kartli

On March 30, the findings from the monitoring of the Tbilisi and Kutaisi City and Appeal Courts were presented in the Gori office of the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association. The organization had monitored the trials into criminal cases. Analytic of the GYLA Goga Khatiashvili said, the number of unverified court verdicts on bail and imprisonment has increased in 2015 in comparison to 2014. 

“The prosecutor’s office almost never provided the Court with the information about financial state of the accused person but requested to impose a bail on him. Although very often the Court tried to estimate the financial state of the accused person, it does not mean that all verdicts were well-grounded. In most cases the Court accepts the solicitation of the prosecutor and imposes relevant preventive measure on the accused person. The number of bail sentences has also increased recently,” Goga Khatiashvili said.

“The Report presents those miscarriages which are observed in the court verdicts into criminal cases; together with the transparency we aim to elaborate relevant recommendations too,” executive director of GYLA Tamar Gvaramadze said.

In accordance to the report, from February 2015 to October 2015 the Court passed verdicts into 53 cases and only 3 of them were non-guilty verdicts.