On October 22, 2020, two children went to court and appealed against their removal from their families and placement in foster care due to poverty. According to the law, it is not permissible to separate a minor from their family due to poverty. That is why the children are still demanding from the court that the decision of the State Care and Trafficking Victims Assistance Agency be declared illegal and that the state be ordered to compensate for moral damages.
The first instance hearing was completed in 8 months and the organization was given the decision within the time limit established by law. As for the remaining period, the case was considered for more than two years by the Court of Appeals, led by judges Leila Mamulashvili, Giorgi Tkavadze and Natia Merabishvili, and then by the Supreme Court. After that, the case was returned to the Court of Appeals and transferred to Gocha Didava for consideration on August 1, 2024. In total, the hearing has been ongoing for 4 years and 6 months and, despite numerous written requests from the organization, it has not yet been completed.
This case is just one example of prolonged justice. Cases in the general courts of Georgia are put away for years. The scale of the problem was also revealed by the Democracy Index – Georgia study. According to the document, the estimated average duration of consideration of civil and administrative cases has been increasing over the years. In particular, from 2018 to 2020, it increased by 1.5-2 times and exceeded 400 days. The scale of the problem is also indicated by the fact that almost half of the disciplinary complaints filed against judges with the Independent Inspector of the High Council of Justice of Georgia in 2020-2022 concern precisely the fact that judges violated the legally established deadline for considering cases for an unjustified reason.
The same study revealed that the picture was not changed by the legislative amendments made in 2012-2022, which also included regulations necessary for the effective management of case flow in the court. The problem remained a problem, despite the creation of a centralized unit responsible for case management – the Management Department of the High Council of Justice, the system for electronic distribution and processing of court cases, the increase in the remuneration of students of the High School of Justice and judges (which is an additional factor in attracting personnel to the court or increasing the motivation of judges), the prerequisites for disciplinary liability of judges for delaying cases were clarified, the rules for judges’ business trips were changed twice, and changes were made to encourage the use of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms.
“The child has been waiting for 5 years for a conclusion that their separation from their parent was illegal”
The Partnership for Human Rights (PHR) is working on the case of two minors . The organization’s lawyer, Sophie Menabdishvili, explained to Aprili Media that this case is precedent-setting, as it was the first time that minors filed a lawsuit in court using a simplified form tailored to children. According to the lawyer, the first instance court granted the request for PHR to protect the rights of the applicants. In addition, Judge David Tsereteli reviewed the case in a short time and ordered the state to pay 35,000 GEL in compensation.
“He listened to the children, invited them to the trial, received information from everyone, and it was a very interesting process,” the lawyer recalls.
As for the second instance, according to Menabdishvili, the case was filed with Judge Leila Mamulashvili after the children returned to their families and were granted reintegration benefits.
“The children went through a nightmare,” is how a representative of the organization describes the discussion processes.
According to the lawyer, the judge was telling the children that they would have to pay back the allowance.
Sophie Menabdishvili / Facebook
“He actually scared these children because they had filed this lawsuit. He also told them, ‘So what if you haven’t been with your mother for two years. I don’t have a mother at all, she is dead.’ The children went through a terrible process, with threats and the fact that they had filed a groundless lawsuit. It was a completely unsuitable environment for these children,” the lawyer tells us.
According to Menabdishvili, despite the fact that the Court of Appeal has the right to investigate issues that the first instance court did not investigate, the court still decided to return the case to the first instance court for retrial.
“We did not agree with this, because we believed that this case had been fully investigated and studied, and we appealed the case to the Supreme Court. It dragged on there too and it was sent back to the appeals court for reconsideration. In other words, it granted our request and said that there was nothing to return and that it could consider it itself,” says the lawyer.
After the appeal was returned, the case was sometimes assigned to one judge, sometimes to another. As of this writing, it is currently assigned to Judge Gocha Didava.
“I have already filed 8 applications, I will file an application in two weeks, saying ‘consider it quickly to protect the child’s interests’. But no one is responding to us. The case is stuck at the appeal stage,” says Sophie Menabdishvili.
According to the lawyer, the court cites overcrowding as the reason for the delay in the hearing.
“Those children needed support at the moment they went to court, they needed help at that moment. Now, they don’t even have hope that this case will end. They have lost trust in the court, they no longer have interest. They think that this case will never end; they think that this way of protecting their rights makes no sense at all. This leads to the feeling in children of, if I went to court, what would be the result? — Nothing. Nobody listens to us, nobody appoints the processes, nobody is interested in our topic.”
Sophie Menabdishvili emphasizes that according to the law, cases related to children must be considered as soon as possible. According to her, the state must strengthen families financially and create living conditions so that they do not separate from their parents.
“Imagine the issue at hand — a child waiting for five years for a decision that his separation from their parent for two years was unlawful; waiting for the money to build a house they don’t have and living in a train wagon. Under effective review, this case could have been resolved in three months.”
Another protracted dispute, which the Partnership for Human Rights representative told us about, concerns a lawsuit filed by blind people against the High Council of Justice. They are requesting an adapted complaint form so that they can file complaints with the court, as the forms posted on the website are currently not accessible to blind people.
The case, which has been pending for 8 years, has been under consideration since 2017 and is currently in the Supreme Court.
“Such cases and delays in court are very common. This is the biggest black spot in their [judicial system]. The courts do not hear cases in a short time, which actually harms the case very much.”
22 Months Waiting for Review
Still from a video / TV Pirveli
Citizen Gvantsa Kveladze also faced the problem of delayed justice, after she appealed to the court after being subjected to violence by the head of the court. Gvantsa says that in June 2023, while working at the headquarters of the “Rezoni”, her boss, Rezo Razmadze, verbally and physically abused her. The footage was initially posted on Facebook by Gvantsa’s friend, where it is seen that Razmadze first calls her a “beggar” and then throws her mobile phone out of her hand.
A few days after the incident, Gvantsa told Netgazeti the details of the incident and recalled the discriminatory phrases Razmadze used to address her.
“I went to work, Rezo Razmadze, the boss, came in, and started shouting at me, ‘Gvantsa, you pig. Why didn’t you clean this up yesterday? Go away, get out of this job.'” He went straight to insulting me. He was telling me, “You peasant, you look awful.”
I would like to highlight this detail in addition: I was burned as a child and have some scars on my body. It is so painful to remember this fact and to draw a line about it… If this had been said to a person who does not have a scar on their face, it would be a different story, but this was direct discrimination based on my scar. I tried to defuse the situation, but he would not stop and would call me a peasant and curse me with other awful words,” Gvantsa recalled.
It has been 22 months since the incident. Gvantsa told Aprili Media that the investigation has been completed and the case has been transferred to court, although the process has not yet begun. According to her, on January 20, she received information that the court session, where two witnesses in the case were to be questioned, was postponed due to the defendant’s illness.
At this stage, Rezo Razmadze has been granted a 2,000-GEL bail as a preventive measure. Gvantsa herself was only questioned 20 months after the incident, in January 2025.
Why are cases being delayed, where is the root of the problem?
According to Ekaterine Tsimakuridze, the chairwoman of the Democracy Index – Georgia, when discussing the causes of the problem, both the judiciary and the political authorities cited the insufficient number of judges as the main and only challenge.
However, the study revealed that this is not the only reason. This is confirmed by the fact that in several Council of Europe member states, where the workload of judges is high, courts cope with the flow of cases better than Georgian courts under conditions of lower workload. According to the study, some courts in Georgia, even under conditions of lower workload, cannot cope with the flow of cases as effectively as heavily loaded courts.
Radio Tavisupleba
Ekaterine Tsimakuridze says that some mechanisms that could be used to relieve the workload of the courts are used for other purposes, including political ones. She cites business trips as one example of this.
“There are often cases when a judge is transferred from a more busy court to a court that is less busy. These illogical decisions directly indicate that the purpose of using secondments is not to relieve the workload . They have some other goals. Sometimes this goal is to have a specific case considered by a specific judge, and not a randomly selected one. Such a goal may also be to promote a certain judge who has shown himself well in terms of obedience to the system, for example, to transfer them from the first instance to the appeals court, or from the region to Tbilisi and, in general, to more favorable conditions for them.”
The fact that this problem also has a political dimension is also emphasized by lawyers interviewed in focus groups as part of the research. When asked why the number of judges in the system is not increasing, some of the respondents cited “political distrust” of new staff on the part of court management.
“The reason why the courts don’t hire enough new staff is their credibility. A person may be a good lawyer, but they lack political credibility,” says one respondent.
Ekaterine Tsimakuridze explains that delaying a case is one of the forms of disciplinary violations by judges. In such cases, the case should be considered by the High Council of Justice, but the reality is that this usually has no effect and no one is held accountable.
“The approach of the High Council of Justice is that there is no form, no violation, no content of the violation for which the judge would be held accountable. This means that this problem is being artificially maintained. On the one hand, because a system is not being created that would relieve the judge, and on the other hand, because if a judge, despite being under a heavy workload, still delays the consideration of the case, he will never be held accountable. This means that the system tells the judge to do as they tell them. Sometimes they can delay the case, put it on the shelf, sometimes he can speed it up even more. There are such cases, we have seen, when the case is considered unusually quickly in these overloaded conditions, which raises even more doubts,” she notes.
Eka also says that the delay in court proceedings worries everyone involved in this system. A case must be heard within a reasonable time frame, and a lengthy process calls into question the effectiveness of justice, which ultimately leads to public distrust of the judicial system.
What could the solution be?
Eka Tsimakuridze also spoke to us about ways to eliminate the problem of protracted judicial proceedings and cited the example of European countries, where, she said, they annually monitor where “traffic jams” appear and study the reasons for this. After identifying problems, unlike Georgia, they respond according to the category of cases they are dealing with.
Recommendations to solve the problem have also been issued in the Democracy Index — Georgia study. According to the document, the problem of case delays should be understood as a large-scale and multi-factorial phenomenon. To solve the problem, the organization provides the following recommendations:
- Case management should be brought into line with modern international standards;
- Procedural legislation should be improved, including by changing unrealistic deadlines, preventing adjournments of hearings in order to improve the efficiency of process management. The principles of cooperation between the judge and the parties should be clearly reflected in procedural laws in order to establish early and continuous control over the case by the judge and plan the cases. In addition, mechanisms for the judge to draw up a procedural calendar together with the parties and control its implementation could be clearly written out;
- Develop an evidence-based policy for measuring the effects of measures taken to expedite case processing;
- The methodology for producing and proactively publishing court statistics should be reviewed and updated;
- Intermediate and overall timelines for case review should be calculated/published and updated periodically;
- Analyze the need for human resources and fill them to the appropriate level, and use existing resources effectively;
- To initiate a discussion within professional unions on the issue of imposing professional liability for intentional delay of cases;
- It is necessary to introduce mechanisms to expedite case processing and compensate for delays.
The Democracy Index — a study prepared by Georgia is available in its entirety here.