The Democracy Research Institute (DRI) responds to the footage released yesterday, 12 June, by Nodar Meladze on TV Pirveli, which appears to document acts of torture and inhuman treatment committed by police officers. Later, the Ministry of Internal Affairs issued a statement acknowledging the incident and claiming that it had occurred four years earlier, in 2022. According to the Ministry, all of the officers involved were arrested in February 2026. Despite acknowledging the incident, however, the Ministry did not specify the nature of the criminal charges brought against the suspects.

The footage clearly shows several police officers repeatedly and deliberately inflicting severe blows on a civilian, targeting vital parts of the body, primarily the head, with the apparent aim of extracting a desired statement. The acts of torture and inhuman treatment continue over an extended period and are carried out with exceptional brutality.

The statement issued by the Ministry in response to the deeply disturbing footage released on 12 June raises several additional questions that require immediate answers:

·         What legal qualification has been assigned to the case, and what stage has the investigation reached?

·         Why did it take several years to arrest the individuals involved, given that their identities were not in question, as the violence depicted in the footage was perpetrated within the police system?

·         Why did the public learn about this incident from the media rather than from the law enforcement authorities?

·         Beyond the cases of abuse that become known through media reporting, how many similar cases have been identified, and what measures have the competent authorities taken in response?

The recent pattern of grave human rights violations in the country gives rise to well-founded concerns that the use of such brutal and unlawful methods has become a systemic practice.

The Public Defender's 2024 Annual Report had already documented a series of grave crimes committed by law enforcement agencies, including torture and inhuman treatment during the dispersal of protests in November and December 2024. Despite extensive publicly available evidence, including victims' testimonies, demonstrating that law enforcement officers repeatedly struck hundreds of individuals in the head and face, while detainees continued to be subjected to torture inside police minibuses, the Prosecutor's Office, following a journalistic investigation, brought charges against only two current and three former law enforcement officers. Moreover, the charges did not reflect the gravity of the alleged crimes. Against the backdrop of these serious abuses, it was particularly alarming that, in January 2025, eleven senior officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, including several individuals who had been subjected to international sanctions for human rights violations, were awarded state honors for their "exceptional contribution to strengthening lawfulness and public order."

On 27 May of this year, a video was also circulated on social media showing a group of law enforcement officers in the city of Gori brutally assaulting a civilian. In that case as well, the Prosecutor's Office charged the police officers with exceeding official authority through the use of violence, rather than with torture.

The authorities' superficial response to the gravest crimes, limited to the arrest of a small number of police officers and the filing of comparatively less serious charges, does not in the slightest mitigate the severe crisis facing the country. Such an approach, particularly the selective response to incidents of violence, fosters impunity for the commission of the most serious crimes. As a result, acts of torture and inhuman treatment risk becoming an entrenched feature of the system. Against this backdrop, a dangerous pattern is emerging whereby the authorities appear to use such grave abuses against civilians as a method of policing.