Georgia's Ruling Party Turned Its Courts Into a Conveyor Belt. It's Still Running.

Georgian Dream did not invent the show trial. But since the rigged October 2024 election and the government's announcement that it was suspending EU accession talks, the ruling party has built something closer to a production line: arrest a protester, charge them with "group violence" or assaulting an officer, run them through a court system stacked with Georgian Dream appointees, and repeat. Civic monitors now count more than 60 people held as political prisoners — not dissidents in some abstract sense, but miners, students, opposition MPs, and bystanders swept up in the crackdown that followed Tbilisi's biggest protest wave in a generation.

The numbers, tracked by Civil.ge from court records and rights groups, are not vague. At least 46 people have been detained and remanded since November 2024 alone on charges stemming from the pro-EU protests; 35 of them have already been sentenced to prison time. Add 11 opposition figures jailed over a boycott of a parliamentary "investigative commission," nine more convicted in the spring 2025 fight against the foreign-agents law, four Chiatura miners still in pretrial detention over a labour dispute, and the picture is not one of isolated overreach. It is policy.

What makes this a Faultline story and not just a regional news item is the machinery underneath the arrests: a Georgian copy of Russia's and Hungary's foreign-agents statutes, now being weaponised against the same NGOs that documented the 2024 election fraud. Seven organisations — including Transparency International Georgia, the Social Justice Center, and the Economic Policy Research Center — received formal demands this year to register as foreign agents or face criminal liability. This is the standard authoritarian sequence: criminalise the protest, then criminalise the people who count the bodies. Anyone who has watched Orbán do this to Hungarian civil society, or watched Putin do it first, has seen this script before.

It matters, too, who is in the cells. Four of the 46 protest detainees are Russian citizens and two are Ukrainian — the state is quietly using its own protest crackdown to settle other scores, holding foreign nationals as leverage while the courts call it "group violence." Meanwhile a handful of billionaire-adjacent business figures have been convicted on financial charges they say are retaliation from Georgian Dream's founder, oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili — a reminder that this repression apparatus doesn't distinguish neatly between political dissent and elite score-settling; both get routed through the same courts, because the courts are the point.

Solidarity from the left has to mean something more specific than noting that Georgia is bad. It means naming that a state can rig an election, then use "rule of law" language — group violence statutes, NGO transparency rules — to disappear the people who challenge the rigging, all while western governments keep the trade doors open because Georgia isn't a strategic enough headache to sanction properly. The 46 in Georgian jails right now aren't an abstraction. They're what happens when nobody outside makes the cost of this repression higher than the convenience of ignoring it.

Sources

Civil.ge — Repression in Numbers
Freedom House — No Reset Without Releases
Free Russia Foundation — Georgian Dream's Political Prisoner System