Tbilisi City Court has delivered a verdict which says that former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, ex-Interior Minister Ivane Merabishvili, ex-Interior Ministry official Erekle Kodua, the Georgian Interior and Finance Ministries must pay $75,000 in moral and psychological compensation to Valeri Gelashvili, a former opposition MP who was brutally beaten in 2005, under the rule of the United National Movement.
Gelashvili’s lawyer Kakha Kozhoridze says that such a decision is quite rare in the Georgian court.
The decision means that we will have the right to demand the payment of the total money from one of them [mentioned above], or from all of them”, Kozhoridze said.
He stated that Gelashvili and his lawyers have not yet decided which form of payment to choose, as the defendants have the right to appeal the recent decision of the court.
In June 2018 Tbilisi City Court sentenced Saakashvili to six years in prison in absentia for exceeding official powers, violence and deliberate damage to health over the high profile violence case against opposition legislator Gelashvili.
Merabishvili was earlier sentenced in the case.