Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili on Sept. 19 turned up at the Presidential Administration in Kyiv to demand documents setting out the legal grounds for the withdrawal of his Ukrainian citizenship.
Saakashvili held a news briefing outside the administration building, while his lawyers went inside the building to officially apply for the documents. They said their previous written requests for the documents had been ignored by the authorities.
Saakashvili’s lawyers say the Presidential Administration, the Citizenship Commission and the State Migration Service have refused to provide their client with the documents since July, when Saakashvili was stripped of his citizenship on the orders of President Petro Poroshenko. The lawyers say they believe this refusal to be illegal.
The Presidential Administration and the State Migration Service declined to comment on the issue. When asked why the State Migration Service would not comment on why it was refusing to give the documents to Saakashvili, its spokesman Serhiy Hunko said “without any reasons.”
Saakashvili said he had been placed in an absurd situation by Ukraine’s authorities.
“I don’t have a passport or documents – I have nothing,” he said. “This is a theater of the absurd that (Austro-Hungarian writer Franz) Kafka would envy.”
Saakashvili said that without the documents he could not file a lawsuit against Poroshenko’s cancellation of his citizenship.
“How can I go to court if I don’t have a single document?” Saakashvili said during his visit to Kyiv. “The president and the authorities in general are playing a con game with us… The fate of a citizen was decided secretly behind his back. And even after it was decided, they are refusing to give any documents.”
Saakashvili also said he is planning to hold a rally in the south-eastern city of Dnipro on Sept. 20.
Saakashvili said that from now on he would be based in a protest camp in the Kholodny Yar area in Cherkassy Oblast, from which he would go to major Ukrainian cities. Kholodny Yar was the base of a Ukrainian insurgent republic that fought against the White Army and the Red Army in 1918 to 1922.
He is going to hold protests in other major Ukrainian cities and attend an Oct. 17 rally in Kyiv calling for the establishment of anti-corruption courts, canceling lawmakers’ immunity from prosecution and adopting a new electoral law.
Saakashvili said that he did not expect a revolution. He argued that the authorities would either succumb to civil society demands or would be replaced peacefully since nobody would defend them with weapons in contrast with ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s era.
“If they fail to resolve this, the people will do it themselves,” Saakashvili said. “On the border the people decided that I must be in Ukraine. Similarly, the people will decide that (the incumbent authorities) must not be in these buildings.”
Saakashvili said that he intended to bring “300 Spartans” as lawmakers during parliamentary elections into the Verkhovna Rada, and they would carry out radical reforms.
Saakashvili foiled the authorities’ attempts to prevent his entry to Ukraine, and broke through the Ukrainian border on Sept. 10. After stopping off in Lviv, he then embarked on a tour of the country, holding rallies in Chernivtsi, Kherson, Ivano-Frankivsk and Vinnytsya.
When Poroshenko stripped Saakashvili of his citizenship in July, he said that the former Georgian president had submitted incorrect information when applying for citizenship in 2015.
However, Saakashvili’s lawyers argue that the cancellation of Saakashvili’s citizenship is illegal because it violates the Constitution, Ukrainian and international law and due process, and is politically motivated. And as a stateless permanent resident of Ukraine, he has the right to enter the country without a visa under the law, his lawyers said.
Lawyer Vitaly Tytych said that only a conviction of a severe crime could be grounds for stripping someone of Ukrainian citizenship, and Saakashvili has not been convicted of any crimes. Lawyers also say Poroshenko’s refusal to publish the decree on Saakashvili’s loss of citizenship is illegal, which Poroshenko denies.
Meanwhile, the Kharkiv Human Rights Group believes Poroshenko’s decree to strip Saakashvili of citizenship violates a constitutional ban on the arbitrary cancellation of citizenship.
Members of the Citizenship Commission who voted for canceling Saakashvili’s citizenship are also controversial. One of them, the Interior Ministry’s State Secretary Oleksiy Takhtai, negotiated a corrupt deal in a video with a person who has already been convicted for the deal.
Saakashvili also applied for political asylum when he entered Ukraine on Sept. 10, in connection with what he views as political persecution by Georgia.
Georgia has asked Ukraine to extradite Saakashvili. However, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said on Sept. 16 that the former Georgian president would not be extradited while he has a residence permit for Ukraine.
Earlier, Deputy Justice Minister Denys Chernyshov said on Sept. 13 that the ministry could make a decision on Georgia’s recent extradition request only after a Tbilisi court convicts him. In 2015 Ukraine rejected two previous extradition requests from Georgia for Saakashvili, arguing that the moves had been politically motivated.
