The Social Justice Center (SJC) is demanding the renewal of the investigation into the manslaughter of Temirlan Machalikashvili from the Special Investigation Service, as per the decision of the Strasbourg Court.
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“On January 19, 2023, the European Court of Human Rights published its verdict on the case of Machalikashvili and Others v. Georgia. The ruling of the Court partially satisfied the request of the appellants and established a procedural violation of the right to life on the part of the state, due to the fundamental violations in the investigation. The European Court pointed out in detail all the flaws of the investigation and shared almost all the arguments of the appellants on the shortcomings of the investigation. Among them, the court found that the requirement of institutional independence of the investigation was not abided in this case, and while the investigation was later taken over by the prosecutor's office, the initial investigative actions, including the recovery of key evidence (extraction of the hand grenade, searching), were carried out by the State Security Service and the investigation by the prosecutor's office was based on this groundwork.
Obviously, the Court did not deem the State Security Service an independent investigative body for investigating alleged crimes committed by its officers. Additionally, according to the court's assessment, plenty of evidence was left unexamined, and Temirlan Machalikashvili's family was not assigned the status of victims, which complicated their involvement in the investigation. It was the fundamental flaws in the investigation that left the European Court unable to consider the violation of the substantive part of the right to life. It is in this part of the case that the decision of January 19, 2023, was appealed on April 18, 2023, on behalf of the Machalikashvili family. However, the Grand Chamber of the European Court recognized our appeal as inadmissible on May 22, 2023.
After the said process, the ruling on the case of Machalikashvili and others v. Georgia entered into force, and the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe supervised the implementation of the decision. The committee included the Machalikashvili case in the group of manslaughter cases against Georgia (Tsintsabadze group) and began heightened supervision.
Our essential demand is to relaunch the investigation at the national level. To this end, we turned to the special investigative service. It is the aforementioned agency that is responsible for the investigation of the facts of the violation established by the legally binding decision of the European Court of Human Rights.
The Special Investigation Service did not formally refuse to start an investigation; however, it wrote us a completely unsubstantiated and vague excuse that the agency would consult with the Ministerial Committee in the next 6 months to ensure the proper planning of steps related to the implementation of the decision.
We believe that this is more an attempt to deliberately delay the resumption of the investigation by the Special Investigation Service. In case of further delay, there is an increasing risk that crucial investigative actions can no longer be carried out properly and the case will go cold,” stated Tamta Mikeladze, representative of the Social Justice Center.
On December 26, 2017, 19-year-old Temirlan Machalikashvili was fatally shot in the head by the special forces in his own bedroom during a special operation in the Pankisi Valley. The State Security Service accused Temirlan Machalikashvili and several other people in the Pankisi valley of cooperating with Akhmed Chataev, a recognized international terrorist, and his group, however, the wounded Machalikashvili succumbed to his injury on January 10, 2018, without being charged. The rest were arrested. The court found them guilty and sentenced them to prison.
The Prosecutor's Office was conducting an investigation into the fatal wounding of Temirlan Machalikashvili under Section 3 of Article 333 of the Criminal Code, which stands for possible abuse of power by violence, however, on January 25, 2020, the investigation was terminated due to the absence of a crime. On March 27, 2020, the Public Defender applied to the General Prosecutor's Office with a request to renew the investigation of the case, which the agency did not satisfy.
For quite a while, Malkhaz Machalikashvili held a continuous protest outside the parliament building in Tbilisi demanding an investigation into the case of his son's murder.
