Ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili on Feb. 13 pledged to return to Ukraine again, and this time make sure that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko goes to jail.
Saakashvili was arrested on Feb. 12 in a Kyiv café by the State Border Guard, police and State Migration Service employees and deported to Poland. This was preceded by an apparent failed attempt to deport him on Feb. 9.
Video footage from the cafe shows Saakashvili being roughly taken out of the cafe on Feb. 12 by armed men, one of whom had grabbed him by the hair. Saakashvili’s press office said the armed men had hit him in the face, threatened to shoot him, and had forced him onto the floor of a bus.
“Along with the Ukrainian people, we will break the necks of the Ukrainian oligarchs, including (Rinat) Akhmetov, (Petro) Poroshenko and his gang, and (Prosecutor General Yuriy) Lutsenko,” Saakashvili said, also mentioning Interior Minister Arsen Avakov among those who will be jailed. “They will not go to Poland because Europe won’t accept them. They won’t go to this terrible dictatorship (Russia) either, because even they don’t want them. They will go to Ukrainian jails.”
Saakashvili and his supporters are planning a major rally for Poroshenko’s resignation for Feb. 18.
“We will organize a mass protest movement, and it will expand,” he said. “I’ll find a moment when I can physically join it in Ukrainian territory.”
Saakashvili said he would tour around Europe in the upcoming weeks. Specifically, he said he would go to the Netherlands to see his family soon.
Saakashvili said he would meet with European and U.S. officials to discuss the introduction of personal sanctions in the West against Ukrainian top officials involved in corruption, in measures similar to the Magnitsky list legislation of the United States and other countries.
The Magnitsky list targets Russian officials implicated in the murder of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009.
“A free Saakashvili (in Europe for Ukrainian authorities) is ten times more dangerous than the one who was persecuted in Ukraine,” Saakashvili said.
Criminal case
Saakashvili mocked Lutsenko, arguing that Ukrainian law enforcers had proven that the criminal case against him had been fabricated by deporting him and preventing him from attending court hearings in Ukraine.
“Will I be tried or not?” Saakashvili said. “How will I be able to go to a Ukrainian court? How will this uneducated prosecutor respond to that? What will happen to this fake case in which there’s not a single witness?”
The Kyiv Court of Appeal on Jan. 26 placed Saakashvili under nighttime house arrest in the criminal case. His house arrest expired on Feb. 6.
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, and by prosecutors and police without a court warrant or 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.
Illegal deportation?
Saakashvili’s lawyers argue that his deportation to Poland was arbitrary and illegal for many reasons.
Serhiy Hunko, a spokesman for the State Migration Service, confirmed to the Kyiv Post that there was no court ruling on Saakashvili’s forced deportation from Ukraine. He claimed that no court ruling was necessary because it was a re-admission to Poland, the country from which Saakashvili came in September, and not a deportation.
Saakashvili’s lawyer Pavlo Bogomazov dismissed these explanations as absurd, saying that re-admission is only possible if a person is deported, and a court ruling is necessary for that.
Forced deportation is only possible under Ukrainian law if there is a specific court warrant for deportation. Even in that case, such a ruling can be appealed against within 30 days, and deportation can only happen after the appeals court has made its ruling.
Saakashvili said that Poland had only agreed to accept him if he arrived voluntarily but he had told Polish authorities he had been brought to the country by force, and violence had been used against him.
The Kyiv Administrative Court of Appeal on Feb. 5 rejected Saakashvili’s political asylum appeal.
Saakashvili’s deportation or extradition would be illegal during the next appeal stage because his lawyers have filed an appeal against the Feb. 5 ruling on asylum with the Supreme Court, and because his current residence permit from the State Migration Service is valid until March 1, Saakashvili’s lawyer Ruslan Chernolutsky said on Feb. 6.
But Saakashvili’s lawyers have argued that their client could not be legally deported or extradited regardless of his asylum status, since it is unlawful to deport or extradite permanent stateless residents of Ukraine. Saakashvili also could not be extradited or deported under the law because he was under investigation in a criminal case in Ukraine, they said.
Saakashvili and his supporters also argued that he could not be expelled from the country because the cancellation of his Ukrainian citizenship by Poroshenko in July contradicted Ukrainian and international law, the Constitution and due process. His lawyers said that his extradition or deportation was impossible before a court decided on the legality of the cancellation of his citizenship.
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.
Human Rights Ombudsman Valeria Lutkovska said in November that three of the Georgians had been illegally kidnapped and deported by the National Police without court warrants. The authorities denied accusations of wrongdoing, but failed to present the legal grounds for the deportations.
