“I advise everyone to immediately start taking care to hire qualified lawyers,” said Davit Usupashvili, one of the leaders of Lelo - Strong Georgia, speaking about the launch of criminal proceedings against Georgia’s former Prime Minister and For Georgia party leader, Giorgi Gakharia.

On the PalitraNews program “360 Degrees,” Usupashvili said that the initiation of criminal prosecution against Gakharia is a classic example of political persecution and political justice, regardless of “when or what Gakharia did.”

“All those representatives of Georgian Dream who held positions during these episodes [June 20, Chorchana] and now sing a different tune are at minimum accomplices in the case and took part in covering up the crime. Now, if they arrange themselves by rank and shrug, saying ‘we oppose this one now’ while about others they said ‘we did not oppose that,’ I advise them all to immediately take care to hire qualified lawyers. The deeper they get involved in these cases - whether it’s Gharibashvili’s case or Gakharia’s - they will prepare indictments against themselves.

Why are they imposing pretrial detention on Gakharia now and for what charges, when these events happened 5–6 years ago? I want to ask: what was the prosecutor looking for over these five years - what did they set out to determine? Chorchana happened live on television, June 20 happened live on television. It wasn’t secret documents like corruption schemes - everything happened openly. So what did they investigate for five years? What new facts did they find that they didn’t know when these events occurred? Both incidents were extremely important in the life of the country in terms of security, crime, and human rights. What were the police, the security service, the prosecution, or those ministers doing at the time - the same people who are now coming forward?

Today the only question to ask is: what were you doing then? If something existed, why didn’t you see it or act on it? If you didn’t see it, is this your justice? How can you claim this is not political persecution? What is it then? If you intentionally covered it up at the time, kept it as kompromat, and now dig it up to destroy someone - to annihilate them - that is political justice,” Usupashvili said.