Appeal Statement of Political Prisoners Levan Terashvili, Kakhaber Terashvili and Davit Shiukashvili to

Prime-Minister of Georgia;

Chairman of the Parliament of Georgia;

Human Rights Committee of the Parliament of Georgia;

Commission under the Human Rights Committee of the Parliament working on the cases of political prisoners;

Public Defender of Georgia;

Representatives of Georgian mass media and press;

All Georgia based human rights organizations 

We, people judged based on unfair and fabricated accusations, are appealing to you for help. We were detained in June of 2011 under Article 236 Part I and II and Article 223 Part II of the Criminal Code of Georgia; the detention was related with our political activities against Saakashvili’s regime.

We were active members of the political party Movement for United Georgia since 2007 and then of its legal successor – Georgian Party.

It is difficult to shortly describe the terror and persecution we went through. We cannot describe our inhuman treatment and torture after detention. However, if we are released from imprisonment, we will make everything public and law enforcement bodies will necessarily get interested in our case.

We kindly request you to pay attention to one concrete fact. A commission was set up under the parliament of Georgia which was to study cases of people arrested on political grounds; our case was on the list. The commission studied our case and handed it to the Human Rights Committee of the Parliament with relevant conclusion. On November 19, the Committee passed resolution and declared people to be political prisoners in the attached list; three of us were on the list together with other people, who were charged under the same fabricated accusation.

The parliament had to adopt the resolution at the session on November 21. As you know, the discussion was postponed for uncertain reason till December 5. At the session on December 5, Ms. Eka Beselia introduced the parliament with the resolution on political prisoners and our names were not on the list attached to the resolution. Ms. Eka Beselia clarified that there were some errors in the case on Levan Terashvili, Kakhaber Terashvili and Davit Shiukashvili.

There is a question: if there were errors in our case, why did they initially insert us on the list and how did they discover the error only afterwards? Why did not the committee or the commission working on this issue request us to eradicate this problem (though they had enough time from November 19 to December 5)? The reason of our removal from the list becomes more obscure when part of the people, judged under the same accusation, remained on the list. We would like to appeal to MPs: Zviad Dzidziguri, Gia Tsagareishvili, Gubaz Sanikidze, Pati Khalvashi, Zurab Abashidze, Koba Davitashvili, Bidzina Gujabidze – who personally witnessed our political activities and together with whom we fought against Saakashvili’s bloody regime for many years; Eka Beselia was one of our co-fighters.

Dear MPs, please draw your attention to this issue and try to restitute justice. Until our case is resolved fairly, we decided to apply to extreme forms of protest because we believe our names were removed from the list groundlessly and we started hunger-strike on December 10. We do hope the problem was caused by technical mistake and not by somebody’s intention against us.

You are fully aware of the sensitiveness of this issue and we kindly request you to carefully study our problem in order to restitute justice for what we and big part of Georgian society have been fighting for many years.

Thank you for your attention in advance,

Political prisoners: Levan Terashvili, Kakhaber Terashvili, Davit Shiukashvili