TBILISI, DFWatch–Three workers were seriously injured on Tuesday in central Tbilisi after falling from a building during construction work on a new luxury complex owned by the billionaire and former Georgian prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili. The three injured construction workers, who are aged 19 to 21, have all been hospitalized with fractures and other injuries. … Read more
TBILISI, DFWatch–The breakaway region South Ossetia was left without Internet Tuesday due to damage to a fiber-optic cable. It is so far unknown what caused the damage to the cable connecting the separatist republic to the outside world. The cable belongs to the Russian company Gazprom. Local mobile operator Megafon-Osetia claims the Internet outage is … Read more
TBILISI, DFWatch–Far-right activists in Georgia are uniting to form a new political party and run in the local and national elections, emulating Marine Le Pen’s Front National. One of the proposals of the new party will be to note a person’s ethnicity in the Georgian passport. Georgian March leader Sandro Bregadze said on Friday that … Read more
TBILISI, DFWatch–Breakaway authorities in Abkhazia plan to lift its moratorium on capital punishment in 2020 as tougher sentences are brought in against drug crime. The de facto parliament of breakaway Abkhazia has adopted a new law which imposes tougher punishments for selling large quantities of drugs, including life sentence and even death penalty. The law … Read more
Georgia showed the most significant drop in incarceration rate among Council of Europe member countries between 2008 and 2019. However, it is the second among countries with particularly high incarceration rates just after Russia, according to new statistics released on Tuesday by the CoE on the situation in European prisons covering the period until end-January … Read more
TBILISI, DFWatch–The success of an opposition candidate in Ukraine’s presidential elections has given Georgia’s former leader Mikheil Saakashvili new hope of making a comeback in Kiev politics. After losing power in his home country, Saakashvili re-launched his career as politician in Ukraine, serving first as governor of Ukraine’s strategically important Odessa Oblast for 18 months, … Read more
TBILISI, DFWatch–Tbilisi City Court on Tuesday approved the extradition of UK fugitive Jack Shepherd, whom British media have dubbed ‘the speedboat killer’. At the hearing, Shepherd himself also expressed his consent to be extradited, explaining that it was not an easy decision, but he wants to clear the issue and reunite with his family. The … Read more
GALI, DFWatch–Sokhumi has set a fixed price for obtaining a residene permit, a document that is required, but hard for many here to obtain. The price will now be set to 600 Russian rubles, or USD 25, which is a relatively decent amount even for impoverished Gali residents. However, local ethnic Georgians who compose the … Read more
TBILISI, DFWatch–Five unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) violated ‘South Ossetian airspace’ simultaneously, entering from Georgia proper, breakaway South Ossetia claims. “One of them hovered over the town of Kvaisa for 20 minutes and then flew towards Georgia,” Egor Kochiev, the head of South Ossetian delegation, said on Friday after a meeting of the Incident Prevention and … Read more
TBILISI, DFWatch–Georgia’s exiled former president Mikheil Saakashvili has asked his political party to find a replacement for him as leader, in order to make it more “flexible”. In a video address publisheed on Facebook, the former president suggested Grigol Vashadze as the best candidate to take over the helm of the United National Movement, but … Read more