TBILISI, November 7 – Georgia’s opposition leaders and their lawyers pushed back Friday after prosecutors opened criminal proceedings against eight opposition figures, including former president Mikheil Saakashvili, on counts ranging from “sabotage” to aiding a foreign power’s hostile activity.
The Prosecutor General’s Office has also asked a Tbilisi court to set bail for Lelo party co-founders Mamuka Khazaradze and Badri Japaridze. That hearing was expected Friday, with pre-trial dates for other defendants to be scheduled.
The charge filings name Saakashvili, Khazaradze, Japaridze, Nika Gvaramia, Nika Melia, Zurab “Girchi” Japaridze, Giorgi Vashadze and Elene Khoshtaria. According to local media, Saakashvili faces an accusation of calling for the violent change of the constitutional order; several others are charged under articles covering sabotage and assistance to hostile foreign activity, with an additional count for Khoshtaria related to supplying material resources.
From his incarceration at a clinic north in the capital, Saakashvili responded that he does not contest being charged over his public calls for sanctions on the ruling party, adding he “will again” urge Western friends to sanction Georgian Dream; separately he said another count concerns an appeal for people to take “a selfie with Ivanishvili’s shark.” Khazaradze called the allegations “absurd” and framed them as an attempt to build a basis to ban Lelo in the Constitutional Court; he also criticized a separate administrative fine from the Anti-Corruption Bureau as a distraction.
Japaridze said the government is “digging its political grave” and argued the state itself is “sabotaging” Georgia’s European future, insisting change must come through elections. Lawyers echoed the political pushback: Nika Gvaramia’s attorney said “law has nothing to do with it,” while a Japaridze lawyer mocked the charge sheet as akin to accusing clients of “digging a tunnel from Bombay to London.”
Khoshtaria, who is detained, rejected any cooperation with what she called a sham process and said she had refused to meet investigators inside the prison. In a separate post she thanked prosecutors “for recognizing my work,” stating she has long advocated sanctions against “Russian Dream” and has fought Russia “since 2002.” Zurab “Girchi” Japaridze and Giorgi Vashadze were also listed in charge summaries published by local outlets Friday.
Another jailed opposition figure, former UNM‘s Nika Melia, through his lawyer, warned that under prosecutors’ logic, any citizen denouncing democratic backsliding or joining protests could be labeled a saboteur. The lawyer argued the new count against Melia is tied to his post-election calls in 2024 for radical street action, including picketing state buildings.
The new sweeping charges caused some policy analysts to draw historic lines to what is happening. Political commentator Gia Khukhashvili wrote that the process unfolding in Georgia “fully repeats” an early-2000s Russian trajectory but “faster and more intense,” suggesting what we are seeing is a consolidation of power similar to the early Putin years.
