The Parliament of Georgia is considering an amnesty draft law submitted by Mikheil Sarjveladze. An alternative amnesty draft law will also be submitted to the Parliament by the Lelo Party. The Public Defender of Georgia welcomes these initiatives and hopes that the Parliament will consider and adopt the amnesty law in a short period of time, which will be in line with the basic principles of criminal justice and the positive obligations of the State towards victims and will apply to a lot of prisoners, who have been in the penitentiary system during the Covid pandemic.

As soon as the pandemic started, the Public Defender actively called on the State to use all available mechanisms to reduce the prison population. Although the rate of application of a number of mitigation measures increased in 2020 (e.g. the statistics on the mitigation of the unserved part of a sentence), the rate of releasing prisoners on parole decreased. The Public Defender hopes that the Parliament of Georgia will take into account the severity of additional restrictions of the rights of prisoners in the context of the pandemic and will compensate their situation with amnesty as much as possible.