The former Georgian president had not eaten food since the beginning of October. Once recovered, he will return to jail to continue serving his sentences.
The imprisoned former Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili was transferred from a prison hospital to a military hospital in the city of Gori, some 80 kilometers west of the capital, where he promised to abandon the hunger strike that began in early October, according to his lawyer. , Nikoloz Gavaramia.
Last Thursday (18.11.2021), the politician vanished during a meeting with one of his lawyers at the prison hospital in Gladni, in Tbilisi, after 50 days on a hunger strike to protest his imprisonment. Lawyer Gavaramia noted that now “specialists must develop a daily protocol after his hunger strike ends” Saakashvili.
For his part, the Minister of Justice of Georgia, Rati Bregadze, said that “after the treatment in Gori, the former president will be returned to Rustavi prison.”
Saakashvili returned illegally to Georgia in late September after eight years in exile. The former president remained on the run from Georgian justice, which sentenced him in 2018 in absentia to three and six years in prison for corruption and abuse of power. He also faces other charges in Georgia, which, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, can carry him up to 11 years in prison, including two to five years in prison for illegal entry into the country.
Saakashvili was deprived of Georgian citizenship in 2015 when he was already governor of the Ukrainian region of Odessa, on the Black Sea, a position to which he was assisted by then-President Petro Poroshenko, who also gave him Ukrainian nationality. In 2017, after antagonizing Poroshenko, Saakashvili also lost his Ukrainian citizenship until the current Ukrainian president, Volodímir Zelenski, returned it to him in 2019 and appointed him head of the Executive Committee of the National Reform Council attached to the Presidency in 2020.