April 18, 2026 - The South Caucasus News - SouthCaucasusNews.com

A number of demonstrators and journalists, including Civil.ge’s chief editor, have reported having their bank accounts frozen by Georgia’s Enforcement Bureau over unnotified police fines related to alleged “road blockages” during Tbilisi rallies last year.

Reports first surfaced during the winter months, when individuals said they discovered the existence of fines only after receiving bank alerts notifying them that the Enforcement Bureau had blocked access to their accounts.

Among those affected was Civil.ge’s chief editor, Nini Gabritchidze, who was notified on February 20 that her account had been seized over what later turned out to be a 5,000 GEL (about USD 1800) fine. The fine was linked to the July 17, 2025, rally on Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue, which she was covering as a journalist. Authorities accused her of “blocking” the road.

A renewed wave of account freezes followed in early April, just ahead of the Orthodox Easter period, which Georgia marked during a long weekend of April 10-13. Protesters and several journalists again reported receiving bank notifications indicating that their accounts had been blocked, without prior warning.

On April 6, Gota Chanturia, a prominent activist, said that many participants of the so-called “Public Broadcaster March,” a group of protesters that had for months organized daily loud marches from Georgia’s Public Broadcaster office to parliament, had their accounts frozen simultaneously.

“The ‘Public Broadcaster March’ is frozen,” Chanturia wrote on Facebook. “Not the march itself, since it is not a legal entity, but many of its active members received this ‘good news’ at the same time.”

Just a day later, on April 7, Liza Tsitsishvili, a journalist at government-critical Formula TV channel, reported that her bank account had also been frozen over a 5,000 GEL fine.

“What was I even doing wrong?” she wrote on Facebook. “I was probably just working as usual, performing my professional duties on September 10 of last year. Until now, I obviously knew nothing about it. […] Everything is unexpected, and at the same time, nothing is unexpected.”

Journalist Maka Chikhladze from TV Pirveli, another opposition-leaning channel, also reported a similar case. “The fine was neither delivered to her nor communicated, and her accounts have now been frozen,” her colleague, Nodar Meladze, wrote on Facebook on April 15, noting that the fine stems from October “when she was interviewing protest participants on Rustaveli Avenue” as part of a journalistic investigation into a controversial “fence” episode from October 4 election-day unrest. Meladze described the case as “retaliation by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia” against the journalist.

Cases have also extended to family members of those jailed in protest-related trials.

Elene Akhobadze, the mother of detained activist Saba Skhvitaridze, said her bank account was frozen on April 7, just as families were preparing to send food parcels to prisoners for Easter. Her son, a member of the opposition Ahali party, is currently serving a two-year prison sentence after being convicted of inflicting “intentional bodily harm” during a pro-EU protest in what the defense has argued was a self-defense episode, citing footage from the incident.

Akhobadze said the measure stemmed from a fine issued for October 2, and argued that in November, she even inquired about the existence of any fines, but was told there were none.

“On November 22, I left the country and had to travel abroad,” she told TV Pirveli. “At the border, I asked the officer, just to double-check, whether I had any fines, and they told me I was completely clear and had none. So I’m wondering, if I had a fine on October 2, why did it not appear for a month and a half?”

Legal Response and Remedies

The notification of citizens regarding the seizure of their bank accounts appears to follow a consistent pattern.

While fine records are published on the official website, they are not accessible without a fine ticket number, information protesters typically lack unless they have been formally notified. The number becomes available only after a citizen requests documentation at a Patrol Police Service Center, and even then, the information on the portal usually confirms that no text notification had been sent to the alleged offender. Nor are the fines published on other police platforms.

Nika Simonishvili, lawyer and former head of Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association, a prominent human rights group, said the recent wave of account freezes appeared to intensify ahead of Easter.

“It appears that the authorities worked with particular intensity before the holiday,” Simonishvili wrote in an April 16 Facebook post, noting that the practice has “caused serious financial problems for many people.”

The lawyer outlined the steps individuals can take to have seizures lifted. According to Simonishvili, citizens should first contact the Patrol Police hotline to confirm whether a fine exists. They should then obtain a copy of the fine report from a Patrol Police service center or the Service Agency, and appeal it in court. Once the complaint is registered, individuals should notify the Patrol Police or the Service Agency by presenting the court-issued registration document.

According to Simonishvili, once an appeal is filed, authorities can verify it through the court system, and the seizure is typically lifted within a few days. While the fine still remains effective until the final court ruling, the lawyer says it will still win enough time since the court proceedings have “practically come to a halt” and “even several thousand complaints filed a year ago have yet to be examined.”

Crackdown on Freedom of Assembly

Following the eruption of non-stop pro-EU, anti-government protests in November 2024, the Georgian Dream government has increasingly used legislative mechanisms to crack down on the freedom of assembly.

The ruling party first introduced heavy GEL 5,000 fines for protest-related offenses, including “blocking roads,” in late 2024. Another series of amendments followed in October 2025, making offenses such as “blocking roads” and “covering faces,” along with other protest-related administrative violations, punishable by immediate detention, while repeat offenses were reclassified as criminal violations, carrying potential sentences of up to one year in prison.

In the initial weeks of enforcing the new laws since October, over a hundred people were arrested, many of whom were sent to administrative detention, while one was charged criminally for a “repeated act.”

Protest regulations were further tightened in December, after police had effectively ended daily road blocking protests by physically pushing protesters onto the sidewalks. The December changes extended assembly restrictions to pedestrian zones and required organizers to submit advance notice of gatherings to the police in a strict procedure that observers saw as a de facto rally-sanctioning system.

The Public Defender’s Office of Georgia said in its annual report that the amendments “cracking down on freedom of assembly have been actively used in practice” throughout 2025, citing 8,200 protest-related administrative offenses recorded in a single year.

The Ombudsman has also challenged protest-related restrictions at the Constitutional Court, including “both mandatory detention and the amount of fines,” as well as criminal liability for repeat offenses.

On April 11, Georgian demonstrators marked 500 days of non-stop protests.

Author: Nino Baindurashvili

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