The Georgia Prosecutor’s Office refuses to conduct a thorough investigation of the crimes revealed during the October 26 elections and asks non-governmental organizations to investigate the crimes.
The monitoring coalition “My Vote” has repeatedly provided information to the public about the schemes, forms, and persons allegedly involved in the process of falsifying parliamentary elections and has also repeatedly called on the prosecutor’s office to investigate dozens of crimes captured on photo and video material: confiscation of identity cards, illegal use of personal data/trespassing, violation of voting secrecy, voting with other people’s ID cards and personal numbers, violence against representatives of monitoring organizations, illegal pressure on voters, and other facts.[1]
There are publicly available photo and video materials, as well as journalistic investigations and complaints submitted to the CEC, which clearly demonstrate election fraud schemes and identify specific individuals who participated in election fraud violations. However, the prosecutor’s office has not responded to these facts in a timely manner. Neither have they immediately obtained the evidence that may be being destroyed or interrogated the persons directly involved in specific criminal actions. They launched the investigation only on October 30, based on the appeal of the Central Election Commission, and now they request Georgian non-governmental organizations to perform investigative functions. We would like to remind the public that, despite numerous statements containing signs of crime, including from the coalition, not a single investigation has been launched regarding the confiscation of ID cards, the so-called call centers pressuring voters, bribing voters, or collecting voters’ personal information.
In response to our numerous statements requesting the initiation a timely response to these crimes, today the prosecutor’s office questioned Londa Toloraia, a member and press speaker of the “My Vote” coalition, as a witness before the judge. Other members of the coalition may also be summoned to testify. Despite the coalition’s desire to investigate election-related crimes objectively, the questions asked by the representatives of the prosecutor’s office during the interrogation of Londa Toloraia indicate that the purpose of the investigative body is not to obtain objective, timely information about the facts of the crime and to conduct an effective investigation, but to confirm the results announced by the CEC.
In the presence of the will to conduct an effective investigation, the prosecutor’s office, in parallel with the timely initiation of the investigation, should have found and studied the direct evidence of the crime, identified the persons and eyewitnesses in the photo-video materials, and immediately interrogated them, since there is a danger of pressure on them.
The fact that the prosecutor’s office, two weeks after the elections, is limited to the questioning of the members of the coalition and has not studied the complaints submitted by the coalition, the video and photo material made public by the coalition, the evidence and the testimonies of eyewitnesses that have been publicly disseminated by the media and citizens, and so far has not started questioning the identifiable persons in these materials, confirms that the purpose of the investigative body is not to effectively investigate the crime but to delay the investigation, hinder the coalition’s activities, and put pressure on the coalition members.
________
[1] Articles 332 (abuse of official authority), 162 (obstructing the exercise of the will in elections), 164 (violation of the secrecy of voting), 164’’ (participation in elections based on a forged document), 164’’’ (forgery of elections), 164’’’’ (influencing the will of the voter), 126 (violence), 151 (threat), and others of the Criminal Code of Georgia.
