TBILISI: Georgia arrested the country’s most celebrated poet on Tuesday and sentenced an opposition leader to several months in prison, intensifying a crackdown on dissent under the Georgian Dream party.
The opposition and the European Union say Georgian Dream is steering Tbilisi towards Kremlin-styled authoritarianism and the Caucasian country has faced an unprecedented democracy crisis since a disputed election last year.
In the early hours of Tuesday, police detained award-winning poet and rights activist Zviad Ratiani at a rally outside parliament, where pro-EU demonstrators have gathered for more than 200 straight days.
Ratiani -- whose modernist poetry and acclaimed translations have earned him recognition as Georgia’s pre-eminent poet -- was charged with assaulting a police officer. He faces up to seven years in prison.
Ratiani had been arrested during post-election protests last year, when he was dragged through the street by police and beaten in detention and in custody.
He spent a week in prison despite sustaining serious injuries.
Later on Tuesday, a Tbilisi court sentenced Giorgi Vashadze, who leads the small opposition Strategy Agmashenebeli party, to seven months in prison and barred him from holding public office for two years.
“The Georgian Dream regime has imprisoned the whole of Georgia. We are fighting for the country’s liberation,“ Vashadze said before the verdict.
He was convicted of refusing to cooperate with a parliamentary enquiry, his lawyer Beka Basilaia told journalists.
Georgia handed similar sentences to three other opposition figures a day earlier on the same charge -- refusing to testify before a parliamentary commission investigating alleged abuses under jailed former president Mikheil Saakashvili.
Saakashvili, a pro-Western reformer, is serving a 12.5-year sentence on charges widely condemned by rights groups as politically motivated.
Opposition leaders have dismissed the commission as illegitimate and accuse the ruling Georgian Dream party of using it to silence dissent.
Ahead of last year’s elections, Georgian Dream announced plans to outlaw all major opposition parties.
Georgia has been in political turmoil since Georgian Dream claimed victory in the October vote -- results the opposition disputes.
Mass protests erupted, growing more intense after the government froze EU membership talks until 2028.
