| U.S. Human Rights Report on Georgia |
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12/03/2010 10:21 (701 Day 09:33 minutes ago) | |||||
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Civil.Ge -- New criminal procedure code and amended election code, allowing for direct election of Tbilisi mayor are named as "significant human rights achievements" of 2009 in the U.S. Department of State’s annual human rights report, released on March 11.
Parliament passed new criminal procedure code last October and most of its provisions will go into force in October, 2010, "The central philosophy of the new criminal procedure code is to establish the legal foundations for adversarial court proceedings: hearings and trials that balance the interests of the state with the rights of the accused, with the judge serving as a neutral and detached magistrate tasked with ensuring fair proceedings," Department of State's 2009 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices says.
The report says that "respect for media freedom declined" in Georgia and similar to previous report, the recent one also says "there were credible reports that the government restricted freedom of speech and the press."
"Throughout the year NGOs, independent analysts, and journalists accused high-ranking government officials and opposition politicians of exercising influence over editorial and programming decisions through their personal connections with news directors and media executives and of exercising influence over advertising income through their personal connections with business owners," according to the report.
It says that media in breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia "remained tightly restricted by the de facto authorities and Russian occupying forces."
The report also says that alleged cases of arbitrary arrest and detention increased last year and politically motivated imprisonment, excessive use of force by the police, government pressure on the judiciary, senior-level corruption in the government, poor prison conditions and abuse of inmates were among main human rights abuses reported in 2009.
According to the report there were "cases of government interference with the rights of assembly and association."
"While three months of protests [in April-July] by the nonparliamentary opposition were generally held peacefully, there was a clear imbalance in protest-related incidents - crimes against government officials were investigated and solved quickly, while this was not the case for crimes committed against nonparliamentary opposition activists," the report says.
Like the previous one, the recent report notes that although levels of petty corruption fell, concerns remained about high-level and "elite corruption." It also says that there were a low number of reported corruption cases among judicial authorities.
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