Georgia thwarts pro-EU protests

The 60-year-old rights activist said he was “ready to face police violence” when he first joined the anti-govern-ment rallies in Tbilisi, but he never imagined that standing on the street for a few hours could cost him more than 22 months’ salary.
Three months into the protests, he received a summons: a total of $16,000 in fines for briefly blocking traffic along Thilisi’s central avenue.
“The government is using Rus-sian-style methods to abolish freedom of assembly in Georgia,” he said.
Khmaladze is one of thousands of Georgian protesters facing crippling fines for taking to the streets.
Prominent writer Mikheil Tsik-helashvili, who returned to Georgia last year from emigration in Portugal to fight against the ruling Georgian Dream party's “pro-Russian policies” has been attending protests daily.
He says he and his girlfriend were each fined the equivalent of $1 850, in what he called a “financial terror aimed at extinguishing popular anger”.
“T took the case to court,” he said, adding however that he had “little hope in Georgia's justice system, which is fully controlled by the ruling party”
Braving bitter frost, protesters con-tinue to rally daily in Tbilisi and cities across the Black Sea nation, in what has become an unprecedented protest movement against Georgian Dream's perceived democratic backsliding and growing rapprochement with Moscow.
The mass protests first erupted fol-lowing disputed p...