Prisoners won disputes with the help of the Public Defender’s Office and GYLA
Tbilisi. In March 2021, the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association (GYLA), in collaboration with the Office of the Public Defender of Georgia and with the support of USAID/PROLoG, started implementation of a pilot project that aimed at providing legal assistance to prisoners.
“In accordance with preliminarily elaborated criteria, there were selected cases of a total of 10 prisoners, who got subjected to various measures of disciplinary responsibility. In the court, prisoners were represented by GYLA.
By this time, hearings of 5 cases have already been completed in Rustavi and Tbilisi city courts. In all five cases, courts satisfied claims and, respectively, imposition of disciplinary sanctions on prisoners by specific penitentiary institutions was declared unlawful. Legal proceedings on the other five cases are continued so far.
The Office of the Public Defender and GYLA anticipate that the pilot project they launched and positive outcomes achieved, as well as standards set by court, will have a positive impact on the existing practice of applying disciplinary measures against prisoners in penitentiary institutions”.
Source: ombudsman.ge
