The deportation of ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, one of the fiercest critics of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, from Ukraine to Poland on Feb. 12 further eroded the rule of law in Ukraine and dented its international image, according to Poroshenko’s opponents.
Video footage of Saakashvili’s detention in a Kyiv café showed him being brutally pushed by armed border guards and grabbed by his hair. Saakashvili said that later the men had hit him in the face, threatened to shoot him and had forced him onto the floor of a bus.
Immediately after that Saakashvili was forced on board of a private plane that flew him to Poland. All of that was done without a court warrant.
Saakashvili was expelled for illegally entering Ukraine in September – an accusation that he denies – after Poroshenko revoked his citizenship in July. His supporters brought him through the border by force and Saakashvili had been fighting deportation since then.
His detention and expulsion violated numerous laws, according to Saakashvili’s lawyers and independent ones. The authorities deny accusations of wrongdoing, claiming that Saakashvili’s deportation was legal.
“This is not my duty as president to decide what will happen to him,” Poroshenko said shortly before Saakashvili’s deportation. “He could be deported but I wouldn’t want that. This is the work of the State Migration Service and the Border Guard.”
The move was the culmination of what Poroshenko’s critics see as political repression, with opponents and critics being routinely arrested, deported or harassed.
As the authorities have cracked down on Saakashvili and other critics, high-profile allies of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych have escaped justice, and not a single top official has been convicted of graft.
Saakashvili was the president of Georgia from 2004 to 2013. In 2015 he received Ukrainian citizenship and became the governor of Odesa Oblast. He resigned as governor in 2016, accusing Poroshenko of sabotaging his reform efforts.
Protest to come
However, with a restless firebrand and outspoken critic of Ukraine’s rampant corruption and sabotage of reforms removed from the political scene, these underlying problems themselves have not melted away.
“The government thinks that it has solved the Saakashvili problem this way,” Viktor Trepak, an ex-deputy head of the Security Service of Ukraine, said on Feb. 12. “But this is a vain hope: Saakashvili’s physical deportation doesn’t change anything because the main reason for existing problems remains in Ukraine.”
A crucial question is whether Saakashvili’s deportation or mounting public frustration with corruption and a lack of the rule of law will ignite bigger protests and unite the opposition to Poroshenko ahead of the 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections.
Saakashvili called on the people to rally for Poroshenko’s resignation in Kyiv on Feb. 18. Previously he was able to hold several opposition rallies in Kyiv, with the biggest one in December attracting up to 20,000 people while others attracted only a few thousand people.
Saakashvili thinks that he can still remotely fuel the protest movement in Ukraine. He said on Feb. 13 he would tour around Europe and meet with European and U.S. officials to discuss the introduction of personal sanctions in the West against Ukrainian top officials involved in corruption.
If large-scale unrest does begin, Saakashvili is planning to return from Poland, assuming that Poroshenko will not be able to prevent his comeback in that case.
Political persecution?
The authorities’ decision to get rid of one of Poroshenko’s most outspoken opponents prompted his critics to compare Poroshenko to Yanukovych and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who have jailed and exiled their political enemies.
“In the times of Yanukovych this would have been called a political vendetta and top-level selective justice,” reformist lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko said on Feb. 12. “Poroshenko’s actions towards Saakashvili must deprive us of our remaining illusions. He will cling to power with his hands, feet and teeth because power to him is not only a way of expanding his offshore accounts, it’s his only way of physically surviving in the conditions of hatred and increasing poverty.”
In January a court placed Saakashvili under nighttime house arrest in a criminal case, which expired on Feb. 6. Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko has accused Saakashvili of accepting funding from Serhiy Kurchenko, a Yanukovych ally, to finance anti-government demonstrations and plot a coup d’etat.
Saakashvili argues that his expulsion from Ukraine shows that the case was fabricated and political, and the authorities could not lawfully convict him.
The prosecutors’ alleged evidence against Saakashvili was dismissed by independent lawyers as weak, and he was released from custody by Pechersk Court Judge Larysa Tsokol on Dec. 11. Tsokol ruled that Saakashvili’s detention by the Security Service of Ukraine without a court warrant and any other legal grounds on Dec. 5 was unlawful.
One of Saakashvili’s associates, Severion Dangadze, is under arrest in the same case.
Moreover, five Saakashvili supporters have been charged in criminal cases linked to what the authorities believe to be his illegal crossing of the border in September. One of them, Oleksandr Burtsev, is under arrest, while another suspect is under house arrest.
Timur Nishnianidze, another Saakashvili associate, has been charged in a different criminal case.
Olha Halabala, a top official of Saakashvili’s party, claimed in December that overall 450 activists linked to Saakashvili were under investigation in various criminal cases.
“Poroshenko and the law enforcement agencies he controls committed an overtly unconstitutional and illegal act – they brutally expelled from the country Mikheil Saakashvili,” several opposition parties said in a joint statement on Feb. 15. “In order to get rid of an opposition leader, the authorities launched a political vendetta, violated human rights and caused big damage to Ukraine’s international reputation. This crime must be investigated. All officials who violated the law and abused their authority must be tried.”
The parties who made the statement include Saakashvili’s Movement of New Forces, ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna, Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovy’s Samopomich, the nationalist Svoboda party and others.
“The Ukrainian government did that to a politician who is well-known all over the world,” they said. “This means that every Ukrainian citizen cannot feel secure and cannot hope for justice. Like during the time of Yanukovych, we are on the brink of a dictatorship.”
Deportation
The way Saakashvili was expelled from Ukraine raised many questions.
He was transported to Poland by a Hawker Beechcraft Premier 1A plane that belongs to Polish firm Jet Story with the help of Ukraine’s Sky Handling company, according to a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty investigation. Such a flight would cost some 8,000 euros. It is still unknown who paid for the jet and whether it was legal to spend state funds on it.
Saakashvili argued that Ukrainian authorities had deceived Poland. He 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.
In its response to the Kyiv Post, Poland’s Border Guard said that Saakashvili had been brought to Ukraine “under so-called re-admission” but did not cite his crossing of the border in September as the basis for accepting him on Polish territory. Instead, the Border Guard said it had let him in because Saakashvili’s wife Sandra Roelofs is a citizen of the Netherlands, a European Union country.
Saakashvili’s lawyers have initiated a criminal case into what they see as his kidnapping by the authorities on Feb. 12.
The State Migration Service said on Feb. 12 it had “re-admitted” Saakashvili to Poland because a court had found him guilty of illegally crossing the border and because another court had rejected his political asylum application in January.
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 per se.
Saakashvili’s lawyer Pavlo Bogomazov and independent lawyers Roman Kuybida and Vitaly Tytych dismissed these explanations as absurd, saying that Saakashvili’s re-admission was only possible if combined with deportation, and a court ruling is necessary for that.
Re-admission without deportation is only possible on the border itself within 48 hours after a person crossed the border, Tytych argued. Moreover, Border Guards only have authority on the border and in airports and had no right to arrest Saakashvili in the center of Kyiv, he said.
Even if Saakashvili had been lawfully arrested with a deportation ruling, such a ruling could have been appealed within 30 days, and deportation could only happen after the appeals court made its ruling.
The Kyiv Administrative Court of Appeal on Feb. 5 rejected Saakashvili’s political asylum appeal. But his lawyers filed an appeal with the Supreme Court, and, under Ukrainian law, his deportation was illegal during this appeal stage. His residence permit from Ukraine’s State Migration Service is valid until March 1.
Moreover, Saakashvili had a legal status in Ukraine – that of a permanent stateless resident – and therefore could not be deported regardless of asylum status, his lawyers argued. Under Ukrainian law, a person who was a permanent resident of Ukraine before being stripped of citizenship is considered a permanent stateless resident, which happened in Saakashvili’s case.
Saakashvili and his supporters also argued that he could not be expelled from the country because the cancellation of his citizenship by Poroshenko in July contradicted Ukrainian and international law, the Constitution and due process, which is denied by Ukrainian authorities. His lawyers said that his extradition or deportation was impossible before a court decided on the legality of the cancellation of his citizenship.
Halya Coynash from the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group argued that “Saakashvili was illegally stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship, and formal grounds for deportation are mere cosmetics.”
Tytych said that a criminal case could be opened against the Border Guards for obstructing justice by preventing Saakashvili from being tried in the coup d’etat case against him.
In a similar way, 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.
The authorities have denied accusations of wrongdoing but have so far failed to give the Georgians’ lawyers documents legally justifying their expulsion from the country.
