Public Defender Urges President to Pardon TV Chief

In a rare instance, the Public Defender’s Office of Georgia urged President Salome Zurabishvili to pardon imprisoned Mtavari Arkhi TV chief Nika Gvaramia after conducting a detailed study of the case.

In the findings, published on June 8, the Public Defender emphasized that Gvaramia should be pardoned as the verdict represents a “gross violation of the principles of legality enshrined in constitutional, national, and international law.”

The document concluded that the judgment against Gvaramia is “unfounded” because of the “extreme scarcity in the consistency” within the legal reasoning and analysis in the case.

According to the report, the most significant issue with the case was that “the judge did not at all evaluate and did not consider in what cases can a corporate-legal action (a manager’s decision) become relevant under the criminal code, when and under what conditions does it require criminal sanctions, and why this case was deemed to have this dimension.”

“In the end, the Court avoided answering all of the important legal questions,” it added.

The document also underlined that the Judge failed to justify both the form of imprisonment used and the scope of the sentence.

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