Parliament Speaker: opposition’s positioning of Saakashvili’s release vs EU integration “false dilemma”

Georgian Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili on Tuesday said the opposition United National Movement party had created “false narratives and dilemmas” in positioning the matter of the release of the imprisoned former President and UNM founder Mikheil Saakashvili in the light of the country’s European integration prospects.

Papuashvili said the topic of Saakashvili, whose appeal for release from prison on health grounds was rejected by Tbilisi City Court on Monday, was a “typical propaganda tool” used by UNM to “capture the attention of the citizens” of the country.

The Parliament Speaker also said a “question of a criminal offender cannot be related to the European integration” of the country.

What we are now observing is a false dilemma. Especially over the last two months, we have been the direct target of a lobbyist, propaganda, PR campaign. Georgia is the target of a propaganda PR campaign, the goal of which is to force a release of Mikheil Saakashvili from prison”, the Speaker of the legislative body said.

“We see that false dilemmas are set up - ‘Mikheil Saakashvili or the European Union’ and so on - [because] otherwise, of course, there is no such dilemma. How can a question of a criminal offender be related to the European integration of the country? This is a false dilemma”, he added. 

A disclosure of the law firm Akerman with the United States Justice Department on February 3 showed it received $917,177 from the family of Saakashvili for the purpose of lobbying US Government officials to help free the former official. 

• Filing shows US law firm received over $900,000 for lobbying for release of Saakashvili

Saakashvili, who was wanted in Georgia, was arrested in Tbilisi in October 2021, after his clandestine return to the country, and is serving a six-year term for two separate cases of abuse of power while in office, with three other cases involving his term pending.