UN urges Georgian authorities to immediately investigate facts of torture in prisons

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has condemned the ill-treatment of prisoners in prisons of Georgia, urging the country's authorities to immediately investigate these facts and bring perpetrators to justice.

"The Georgian TV showed shocking videos, where prisoners are subjected to physical and sexual abuse and humiliation by prison staff," Rupert Colville, the press secretary of the Office of the High Commissioner, said at a press briefing in Geneva.

According to Mr Colville, the torture victims should have access to adequate medical and psychological care, as well as receive due financial compensations.

"We urge the government to ensure that all the allegations of violations of human rights, and not only those that are captured by the videos, were promptly, impartially and effectively investigated, and the perpetrators brought to justice," he said.

Mr Colville has noted that the international law prescribes ban on torture and reminded that Georgia had ratified the Convention Against Torture and the Optional Protocol thereto, which allows national and international experts to carry out unannounced inspections in prisons, the official UN website reports.

Meanwhile, the Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili is accusing Russia, at the background of what is happening in his country, "of unleashing the war of compromising materials", the "Interfax" reports. "They wage was against us for Russian money, by Russian method of the war of compromising materials, by threatening us and rattling weapons at our border, but they'll fail to intimidate us," he said, stressing that they try "to impose on Georgia the Russian way of development, to bring us back into the past and close the road to the future."

The leader of the oppositional coalition "Georgian Dream" Bidzina Ivanishvili advises President Saakashvili to resign as soon as possible, the "Civil.ge" writes. "Today, I want to give him my last advice - to resign. And that is why, I argue: he succeeded in creating in the country the mechanism of lies... He gave birth also to the torture that we saw in prisons. All the cards are exposed. He can't play' and we know everything - both here and in Europe," he said.

Meanwhile, Georgi Tugushi, the new Minister of Correction, Probation and Legal Assistance of Georgia, has ordered to allow journalists into Gldani Prison No. 8. Some prisoners told media people through the windows of prison cells that the situation had changed for the better after the prison was visited by employees of the Patrol Police.

Besides, Mr Tugushi, who is the former Ombudsman, has ordered to immediately transfer all the prisoners, whose health causes concern, to hospitals.

In his turn, the parliamentary secretary of the government Giya Khuroshvili said that the President of Georgia would present - within one week - to the Parliament a new membership of the Cabinet of Ministers in the context of resignation of the Interior Minister Bacho Akhalaya, the GHN reports.