It’s 3:00 AM when I climb out of the subway in the South Bronx into misty smells and trash-strewn streets to see something that never fails to amuse or amaze me.
Day: June 24, 2025
Poet Zviad Ratiani was detained during the June 23 nighttime protest near Parliament in Tbilisi. The Interior Ministry told Civil.ge that he assaulted a police officer – a criminal offense punishable by four to seven years in prison.
A video footage of the arrest shows officers escorting Ratiani into a police van. In another footage, when a protester asks the reason for his arrest, one officer responds that Ratiani “approached an officer and hit him without any reason.” The videos, however, do not capture the alleged assault.
Zviad Ratiani, a vocal critic of the Georgian Dream government, was previously detained on November 29, 2024, and sent to eight days of administrative detention for alleged petty hooliganism and disobedience to police – charges frequently used against protesters. Ratiani later recounted beatings and insults during his detention.
Several other individuals arrested during the ongoing anti-regime protests face similar charges of assaulting police officers or public officials. Journalist Mzia Amaghlobeli has been held since January 12 after slapping Batumi police chief Irakli Dgebuadze. Teacher Nino Datashvili was detained on June 20 over an earlier incident at Tbilisi City Court, where she was forcibly dragged out of the building amid tensions when, according to the authorities, she slapped one of the bailiffs.
On June 12, 21-year-old protester Mate Devidze was sentenced to four and a half years in jail on similar charges, over an incident where he was swinging a stick-like object at police officers pursuing him during an early-morning dispersal of a protest rally on November 19, 2024.
Dozens of detained protesters remain behind bars, awaiting verdicts on charges including group violence and assaulting police officers, amid concerns about the fairness of the trial and the truthfulness of the police testimonies. The arrests and convictions come as no police officer has been held accountable, despite dozens of documented cases of police violence against protesters and journalists during the first weeks of non-stop demonstrations that erupted on November 28, 2024, after Georgian Dream announced it was halting EU integration.
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