Georgian court begins hearing lawsuit seeking ban on major opposition parties

By Lucy Papachristou

TBILISI, Oct 21 (Reuters) - A court in Georgia opened hearings on Wednesday in a lawsuit filed by the government seeking outright bans on the five main opposition parties, in a move that civil society groups say presages the beginning of one-party rule in the South Caucasus country.

The Constitutional Court in the Black Sea city of Batumi will meet for three days to review the suit, first filed by the ruling Georgian Dream party a year ago. The court, whose ruling is final and cannot be appealed in Georgia, must give its decision by June 2027.

The lawsuit marks the culmination of government efforts to crack down on the political opposition since Georgian Dream clinched victory in a 2024 parliamentary election that the opposition says was rigged.

Georgian Dream, in power since 2012, is seeking to outlaw the five parties on the grounds that they pose "a real threat to the constitutional order".

The ruling is about "depriving a large part of Georgian society of genuine political choice and fundamentally changing the nature of the country's political system," said Giorgi Butikashvili, the foreign secretary of the Ahali-Coalition for Change, a party named in the lawsuit.

Rights groups and the European Union, which Georgia is seeking to join, have also condemned Georgian Dream's move.

'CONSOLIDATION OF AUTHORITARIANISM'

Once among the most democratic and pro-Western of the successor states to emerge from the Soviet Union, Georgia has turned increasingly authoritarian and deepened ties with Moscow since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Georgian Dream says it is protecting the country from opposition figures who it says are trying to seize power and foment a catastrophic war with Russia, which fought and won a short war with Georgia in 2008.

The country received EU candidate status in 2023 but Brussels now says it has backslid on its democratic reforms so far that it is considered a candidate country "in name only".

Kornely Kakachia, a political science professor at Tbilisi State University, said the ban would challenge the minimum standards of political pluralism expected of an EU candidate country.

"Georgia is moving from democratic backsliding towards the potential consolidation of authoritarianism," he said.

The government's lawsuit was initially filed against three opposition groups but has since been widened to five, all of them pro-Western. Only one, For Georgia, has seats in parliament.

The case is based partially on an extensive report prepared by a parliamentary investigative commission looking into alleged crimes and human rights violations carried out under the previous government, led by former President Mikheil Saakashvili.

(Reporting by Lucy Papachristou, Editing by Timothy Heritage)