Communicated on 15 September 2014
FOURTH SECTION
Application no. 652/10
Besarion BOTCHORISHVILI
against Georgia
lodged on 7 December 2009
STATEMENT OF FACTS
1. The applicant, Mr Besarion Botchorishvili, is a Georgian national, who was born in 1964 and lives in Tbilisi. He is represented before the Court by Mr Z. Khatiashvili and Mr T. Simonishvili, lawyers practising in Tbilisi.
2. The facts of the case, as submitted by the applicant, may be summarised as follows.
A. General background
3. Between early April and late June 2009 thousands of opposition supporters held demonstrations in various parts of Tbilisi, as well as in a few other major cities of the country, on a daily basis, demanding resignation of President M. Saakashvili and his Government. In the light of those ongoing protests, which were often accompanied by confrontation between demonstrators and police forces, the Office of the Public Defender of Georgia established a 24-hour monitoring group for the purposes of recording human right breaches. The applicant, a certified member of the Georgian Bar Association, was a member of that group.
4. In the morning of 6 May 2009, three young activists of the opposition forces were arrested for breach of public order and placed in a short remand prison of the Tbilisi police headquarters. Their arrest provoked a spontaneous gathering of hundreds of people in front of the police building later in the afternoon of the same day. A situation escalated when one of the protesters climbed over the fence into the police compound, and, in reply, riot police officers, who had been mobilised to protect the territory of their headquarter, starting firing certain unidentified projectiles from non-lethal riot guns into the crowd at close distance. As a result of the shooting, many protesters received bodily injuries of different gravity. Subsequently, the riot police started dispersal of the demonstration, beating protestors with truncheons.
B. The circumstances of the case
5. Alerted that the police had started using force against the street protesters, the applicant went to the scene later on the same day of 6 May 2009. Having arrived there, he approached a cordon of riot police officers who had reportedly been ill-treating a young protester of 15 years old. The applicant, after having presented himself as an advocate and a member of the special ad hoc monitoring group, demanded the officers to let him approach the victim. In reply, a few officers hit him in the face and over the head with hand fists and rubber truncheons. The applicant started bleeding from his head and nose and went first to the office of the Public Defender of Georgia and then to a hospital, where he was provided with the necessary medical care for his injuries. A medical certificate issued by the hospital on 7 May 2009 confirmed that the applicant had received a closed head injury, concussion, with bleeding from open skin lesions.
6. On 9 June 2009 the Ministry of the Interior, acting on the basis of the applicant’s criminal complaint, launched an investigation into his ill‑treatment during the dispersal of the demonstration on 9 May 2009. According to the case as it stands at hand, that investigation did not lead to any result.
COMPLAINTS
7. The applicant complains under Articles 3 that the police ill-treated him and did not allow him to exercise his professional duties during the dispersal of the demonstration on 9 May 2009.
QUESTIONS TO THE PARTIES
Was the applicant subjected to ill-treatment, in breach of Article 3 of the Convention, during the dispersal of the demonstration by the police on 5 May 2009?
- Have the competent domestic authorities conducted an adequate investigation into the applicant’s above-mentioned allegation of ill‑treatment, as required by the procedural obligation under Article 3 of the Convention?
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