TBILISI, November 20 – Georgia’s Public Defender says overcrowding and basic conditions in the country’s largest jail remain a serious problem.
In a statement on Thursday, the Public Defender’s Office said its National Preventive Mechanism (NPM) regularly visits Prison No 8 in Gldani, northern Tbilisi, and other facilities and has already carried out 114 inspection visits in 2025 to places where people are deprived of their liberty. These include prisons, police stations, temporary detention isolators, court holding cells, psychiatric hospitals, elderly care institutions, a migrant detention center and military units, covering a total of 93 institutions.
According to the Ombudsman, chronic overcrowding remains one of the biggest challenges in large prisons, especially in No 8, which is the biggest facility in the system. Food quality is another major concern. The NPM says it has issued multiple recommendations to improve prison menus and wants the National Food Agency to run regular, unannounced checks on the quality of food served in jails.
The Public Defender stresses that NPM teams enter facilities without prior notice, speak to detainees and staff, and then publish reports and recommendations. The goal is to strengthen safeguards against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
The statement notes that detailed findings on prison conditions were already laid out in the NPM’s 2024 report, and that implementation of recommendations will be assessed again in the Ombudsman’s 2025 parliamentary report and in a separate NPM report.
