Three police officers were given five-year prison sentences on November 12 in connection with violence against journalist Guram Rogava and protester Zviad Maisashvili during the initial days of police dispersals of pro-EU protests that erupted on November 28, 2024.
These are the first guilty verdicts in cases of police abuse during the dispersals of 2024–2025 protests, following longstanding concerns that no police officers had been held accountable despite numerous documented cases. However, human rights advocates and victims in the case have raised questions about both the investigations and the extent of justice delivered.
Georgian prosecutors announced arresting three and identifying two more suspects already in jail in cases of Rogava, Maisashvili, and politician Levan Khabeishvili in May. The prosecutors said at the time that those identified include three former and one current officers of the Interior Ministry’s Special Tasks Department.
All five suspects were charged with exceeding official authority with the use of violence, while the suspect in the Rogava case was additionally charged with unlawfully obstructing a journalist’s professional activities through violence.
Rogava, who was covering the protests as a Formula TV journalist when he was attacked by a riot police officer, causing the journalist to fall and sustain heavy injuries, reported on the sentence on November 12, expressing distrust in the investigation.
The journalist said that he was notified by prosecutor Lasha Gamkrelidze about the verdict against riot police officer Goga Kirkitadze that day, without him being even summoned for questioning throughout the closed-door court proceedings in what he described as an “absurd” case.
He further said that, to his knowledge, “the actual perpetrator remains free because he is one of the key figures in other high-profile and bloody cases and enjoys a guarantee of impunity from the regime.”
Separately, the lawyers of Zviad Maisashvili, whose severe beating during the dispersal has been filmed on camera, confirmed to Georgian media outlets that two riot police officers were given five-year sentences in his case.
All three sentenced officers were also barred from carrying out professional activities for three years.
Reacting to the verdicts, Tamar Oniani, head of the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association, wrote on Facebook that the course of these proceedings is an attempt “to conceal the systemic nature of torture, break it down into individual incidents, and sever the chain of accountability precisely where the responsibility of the organizers and those who issued the orders begins.”
According to Oniani, the arrests and sentences make up only a very small part of similar cases of police abuses, where at least 167 people in total have been recognized as victims.
The arrests and verdicts follow longstanding concerns voiced by local and international human rights watchdogs, as well as Georgia’s public defender, over Georgia’s failure to hold a single police officer accountable despite numerous documented abuses against protesters during the 2024 dispersals and while jailing dozens of demonstrators on protest-related charges.
Georgian officials, while eventually acknowledging some of the abuses, attributed the lack of prosecutions to an inability to identify the uniformed suspects.
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