Lenta.ru: Georgian opposition political prisoners’ count

This is my first attempted translation from Russian, so please have mercy on me. You can read the original here.

The number of political prisoners in Georgia exceeds 150, these data, as IA Trend reported, were announced by the opposition Conservative party of Georgia.

The data were received by a commission established on the initiative of the opposition. Leading human rights organisations in the country took part in her work.

In her report political prisoners are divided into 11 groups. Among them are those opposition activists arrested during the anti-presidential marches that took place from April to June this year; participants of meetings that took place in Autumn 2007 and which were dispersed on 7 November that year; supporters of the former ‘government-security’ minister Igor Giorgadze; and those convicted of planning a regime change in 2006 (when massive arrests of opposition members and raids on their offices were conducted).

Also included in the count were officers arrested on the pretext of planning the ’Mukhrovan mutiny’ in May this year.

The human rights defenders claim that political arrests in Georgia began in 2005, two years after the ‘rose revolution’. Initially as the commission claimed, they were intended as means of personal vendetta.

Earlier (end of May this year), representatives of the opposition spoke about several tens of political prisoners, these data were put forward at a roundtable work titled ‘Political prisoners in Georgia, myth and reality’. Commenting on the situation, lawyer Gela Nikoleishvili contended that in the majority of these cases the arrests were made possible because people are secretly given guns or narcotics, IA News-Georgia reported.

My commentary: I think we had been told that Misha is a democrat in 2008 and that Russia is slowly on the march towards nationalistic authoritarianism.