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Human Rights Center Requests the Prosecutor’s Office to Study the Fact of Threatening the Political Refugee with Life Infringement

July 14, 2016
 
With legal aid of Human Rights Center, citizen of Canada Maya Tsaboshvili appealed the Chief Prosecutor’s Office of Georgia with the request to commence investigation into the fact of threatening her with infringement on life; she was threatened by the users of the Georgian social network Tbilisi Forum www.forum.ge.
 
Maya Tsaboshvili has been registered user of the Tbilisi Forum for many years; registration on the Forum is available for everybody and users can exchange political views between each other and discuss problematic issues.
Each user of the forum has his/her unique nickname. Regardless the Article 2.5 of the Forum regulations, which guarantees defense of personal data and confidentiality of the information, personal data of Maya Tsaboshvili were several times disclosed to other users.

Because of personal political views expressed in the Tbilisi Forum, Maya Tsaboshvili became target of aggressive attacks from other users; their posts contained signs of ethnic discrimination, disseminated false information and slandered the political refugee. The users used hate speech with extremely abusive words. 

Concrete rules elaborated by the Forum owners and administration are published on the website; each user has to confirm compliance with the rules before starting posting in the forum. It is the statue which contains general declaration, prohibitions, restrictions and other regulations for the forum users. The actions conducted against Maya Tsaboshvili contradict the mentioned rules. The forum administration purposefully or with negligence avoids implementation of the rules that may be caused by xenophobic attitudes towards Tsaboshvili.

The hate speech used by the forum users and the administration members – moderators against Maya Tsaboshvili contain signs of discrimination; namely, in relevant topics Maya Tsaboshvili is discredited on ethnic grounds – she is ethnic Ossetian. Part of the forum users insult her because of ethnicity and write degrading posts about her, disseminate ungrounded calumny about her claiming that she is separatist and is against the territorial integrity of Georgia. Regardless the forum regulations, neither moderators nor administrators filter those posts or/and punish the violators; moreover, they themselves support the claims that Maya Tsaboshvili is separatist.

Majority of Tbilisi Forum’s users are ethnic Georgian people and sometimes people of other ethnicity do not have possibility to express opinions freely. Similar discriminative approach of the Forum’s administration encourages aggressive users of the social network.

It is particularly alarming that Maya Tsaboshvili was threatened with infringement on her life and was insulted with extremely abusive words.
Human Rights Center believes the Tbilisi Forum’s administration shall immediately combat similar aggression and any forms of intolerance; as for the threats to infringe on the user’s life, the Chief Prosecutor’s Office of Georgia shall study the case.

In accordance to the Article 151 of the Criminal Code of Georgia threatening is punishable under the criminal law in case the person being threatened of death or damage to health or destroying property has reasonable fear that the threat will be carried out. 
 
In recent history Maya Tsaboshvili was active politician and participated in the elections of the head of the temporary administration of South Ossetia. After the elections, she was member of the government of the South Ossetia’s temporary administration. Later, due to different political views with the head of the administration, she was persecuted on political grounds and finally she received a shelter in Canada.

Human Rights Center 

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