The Kyiv Court of Appeal on Jan. 26 placed ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili under nighttime house arrest in a criminal case.
Saakashvili will not be able to leave his apartment on Kostyolna Street in downtown Kyiv from 10 p.m. until 7 a.m.
“This is not a court, they are corrupt scumbags!” Saakashvili reacted to the ruling. “I accept the challenge of Ukraine’s thief-in-chief (President Petro) Poroshenko – a shameful nuisance in Ukrainian history. This is a direct attempt to restrict my political activities.”
Poroshenko has denied the accusations of corruption.
Saakashvili also announced plans to organize further street protests, including a major rally on Feb. 4.
“If this biased court decides to put me under house arrest, it will not stop our further actions, and they will be very radical,” Saakashvili said at the hearing. “I will act from my apartment. We will call for large-scale protests that will inevitably lead to government change.”
Kyiv Court of Appeal Judge Oleh Prysyazhnyuk, who presided over the Jan. 26 hearing on Saakashvili’s house arrest, upheld a verdict in a criminal case against Yuriy Lutsenko – then an opposition politician and now prosecutor general – in 2012. The case has been recognized by Ukrainian and European authorities to be politically motivated.
Prysyazhnyuk and two other judges who considered Saakashvili’s house arrest, Denys Masenko and Viktor Hlynyany, have been accused of links to Poroshenko ally and lawmaker Oleksandr Hranovsky, who denies them. They have regularly made decisions in favor of the authorities, including in the hearings against opposition politicians Gennady Korban and Igor Mosiychuk.
In 2016 Hlynyany’s son was appointed to the prosecutor’s office’s department accused of links to Hranovsky, and he was previously responsible for cases heard by the Kyiv Court of Appeal, where his father works, prompting accusations of a conflict of interest. Hlynyany and his family own seven apartments and four houses in Kyiv, according to his asset declaration.
Masenko has been transferred from a court in Russian-occupied Luhansk to Kyiv by Poroshenko, which has been interpreted by critics as a move that guarantees political loyalty.
Lutsenko has accused Saakashvili of accepting funding from fugitive oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko, an ally of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, to finance anti-government demonstrations and plot a coup d’etat.
Saakashvili, who was arrested on Dec. 8, believes that the case is a political vendetta by Poroshenko. The prosecutors’ alleged evidence against Saakashvili was dismissed by independent lawyers as very weak, and he was released by Pechersk Court Judge Larysa Tsokol on Dec. 11.
Tsokol ruled that Saakashvili’s detention by the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, prosecutors and police without a court warrant and any other legal grounds on Dec. 5 was unlawful. Saakashvili, who was freed by hundreds of his supporters on the same day, has since claimed the detention was an attempted kidnapping.
Tsokol said the prosecutors had failed to provide evidence to justify placing any restrictions on Saakashvili. The judge also referred to contradictory testimony allegedly given by unidentified SBU agents “Hare” and “Wolf.” The alleged events to which the agents referred as having happened in the past took place after the agents mentioned them, the judge said.
In December the SBU’s forensic institute made the conclusion that the voices of Saakashvili and Kurchenko in an alleged recording of their conversation were genuine.
Saakashvili and his lawyers said at the Jan. 26 hearing that SBU investigators had initially asked the forensic institute to check if the recording was tampered with and included different fragments. But later they withdrew this request, and the forensic institute did not say whether the recording included different fragments or was manipulated, which could mean that the conversation did not happen.
“With their own actions they proved that they falsified it,” Saakashvili said. “It’s been proven now that they manipulated and forged (the recording) on Poroshenko’s orders.”
The SBU denied the accusations. The examination has also been lambasted because it was conducted by the SBU’s forensic examination institute, not an independent institution.
According to an assessment made by the Kyiv Independent Forensic Expert Institution, the recordings of alleged conversations between Saakashvili and Kurchenko and between a Saakashvili associate and a Kurchenko associate were manipulated, and there are at least 24 fragments merged with each other.
Saakashvili, who denied having spoken to Kurchenko, and independent lawyers also said that there is no evidence of any crime in the alleged conversation even if it had happened.
Meanwhile, the Kyiv Administrative Court of Appeal will consider on Feb. 1 rejecting Saakashvili’s application for political asylum. Saakashvili’s lawyers on Jan. 22 asked the judges to recuse themselves but they did not.
Saakashvili says Ukrainian authorities may use a potential rejection of his political asylum application as an excuse to illegally deport or extradite him immediately, although his deportation or extradition is banned by the law.
He said on Jan. 26 that Ukrainian authorities had recently asked Poland if they could deport him there.
Saakashvili’s lawyers have argued that their client cannot be legally deported or extradited regardless of his asylum status because it is unlawful to deport or extradite permanent stateless residents of Ukraine. Saakashvili also cannot be extradited or deported under the law because he is under investigation in a criminal case in Ukraine, they say.
Saakashvili has applied for political asylum, arguing that the criminal cases against him in his native Georgia are politically motivated.
Ukrainian authorities recognized Georgia’s criminal cases against him to be politically motivated when they rejected Georgia’s extradition requests for Saakashvili in 2014 and 2015.
In October and November, seven Georgian associates of Saakashvili were deported to Georgia by Ukrainian authorities without court warrants, with the Georgians claiming they had been kidnapped and beaten. Under Ukrainian law, forced deportation is only possible if authorized by a court.
Human Rights Ombudsman Valeria Lutkovska confirmed in November that three of the Georgians had been illegally kidnapped and deported by the National Police without court warrants.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court will also consider on Jan. 29 Saakashvili’s lawsuit to recognize the cancellation of his citizenship by Poroshenko in July as unlawful.
Poroshenko claimed that the cancellation was due to the alleged fact that Saakashvili had submitted incorrect information when he applied for citizenship in 2015. Saakashvili says the cancellation violates Ukrainian and international law and due process and is politically motivated.
Meanwhile, David Sakvarelidze, an associate of Saakashvili, said on Jan. 25 that the criminal case against him was being sent to trial. He is accused of illegally transporting Saakashvili across the border during the ex-president’s dramatic breakthrough into Ukraine on Sept. 10.
