On November 1, the Public Defender of Georgia, Levan Ioseliani gave an interview to Palitranews about his position on the allegedly fraudulent elections in Georgia, saying that his mandate does not provide for qualifying the legitimacy of the elections, that he is looking into some facts of electoral fraud or violation of the law before, identified by his office during and after the election day, and claimed that the opposition refuses to cooperate with him.
Asked whether he believed the October 26 elections were held in a free, fair and democratic environment, he said: “The fact is that this question should not be addressed to the Public Defender. Neither I nor any other public defender of Georgia. None of them have ever assessed the legitimacy of elections, because that is not the mandate of the Public Defender. We have made statements about this many times. We are not a monitoring organization, we did not observe [the elections], so neither I, nor my successor, nor any other Public Defender can discuss whether the elections are legitimate”.
Asked why so many people were expecting his statement, Ioseliani explained that in some cases it was due to incompetence and in others, it was to discredit the Ombudsman’s office, adding: “Well, the people who asked for it and the style of those politicians in which they asked for it, their goal was clearly to discredit [the institute]. Their goal was to somehow drag me or my Office into this political discourse… They know very well that we did not observe the elections, they know very well what we do within our mandate”.
According to him, his Office, within its mandate, has identified 110 incidents recorded by the media that show signs of violations of the law in the pre-election period, on election day, and after. He said that only one non-governmental organization appealed to the Ombudsman, interested in finding out about these violations. He also noted that the Office has already appealed to the relevant authorities on all identified facts and will publish the information on the stage of investigation.
As to why his Office is criticized by the opposition, he said that it is because he doesn’t side with certain political parties and doesn’t make “absurd statements” with them, like “that 350,000 people are part of Georgian Dream’s carousel scheme”, because he claimed, it would be logistically impossible to drive around so many people and “with no one knowing”. He also said that he had doubts about the claims that 100,000 people had their IDs confiscated because, he said for two months his Office had been asking people to appeal, if their documents had been taken away, and no one had written a complaint.
In response to claims that the marker was visible on the back of the ballot paper, clearly showing who the person voted for, which violated the secrecy of the vote, he said that his mandate was to ensure that every person votes freely and expresses their will without pressure. “But that it should be assessed in a larger context, whether this [the issue of visible markers] has anything to do with the expression of a person’s will. Commenting further on the issue, he said: “There were procedural violations, nobody denies that.”
Ioseliani also claimed that the opposition parties refuse to provide evidence of intimidation/fraud/bribery/confiscation of IDs, despite his “numerous public and private appeals.” He called on the opposition parties to present any evidence they have that the state is not responding adequately to, promising “to do everything in his power” to transparently investigate these cases. He also said that the cases identified would be included in his report on the elections.
Finally, addressed the rally announced by the opposition for November 4 and the demonstrators’ intention to use tents, saying that it is fully within their right of expression and calling on the MIA not to obstruct it. He also pointed out that the tents are not the final goal of the rallies, meaning that having the tents doesn’t mean anything if they are empty, and called on the demonstrators to use the tents to properly express their opinions.
The Public Defender has often been criticized for his lack of or delayed response to human rights issues. His interview has similarly faced criticism on social media. The former Deputy Ombudsman, Giorgi Burjanadze wrote in a Facebook post: “In reality, the Public Defender has the power to oversight the constitutionality of elections, and not knowing this is allegedly incompetence. This power is the only one that is directly written in the Constitution, the rest is in the Organic Law. Incidentally, the fifth Public Defender of Georgia prepared a special report on certain elections. The right to participate in elections and the realization of this right is under the mandate of the Public Defender.”
According to Georgian Constitution’s fourth part of the Article 60, subsection H, the Constitutional Court must “review disputes related to norms regulating referendums or elections, and the constitutionality of referendums and elections held or to be held based on these norms, based on a claim submitted by the President of Georgia, by at least one fifth of the Members of Parliament, or by the Public Defender.”
Similar rights are described in the organic law on the Public Defender. Article 14 part 1 subsection E gives him/her the right to determine the “constitutionality of norms regulating referendum and elections and of elections (referendums) held or to be held according to those norms.” Article 21 subsection I also gives him/her the right to “apply to the Constitutional Court of Georgia with a constitutional appeal related to the constitutionality of norms regulating referendums and elections and of the elections (referenda) held or to be held based on these norms, or when a normative act or some of its norms violate human rights and freedoms recognized by the Second Chapter of the Constitution of Georgia.”
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