Reports

This report describes the impact of overly punitive drug laws and practices on people who use drugs, and on their families. Human Rights Watch documented abusive, mandatory street drug testing, coerced plea bargains, and arbitrary additional punishments, such as stripping people of their driver’s licenses or prohibiting them from working in an array of professions, interfering with their ability to earn a livelihood. Georgia has partially liberalized drug laws, but they remain harsh. 

This 41-page report documents how Georgia’s Code of Administrative Offenses, which governs misdemeanors, lacks full due process and fair trial rights for those accused of offenses under the code.

This 71-page report documents the arbitrary interference by Abkhazia's de facto authorities with returnees' rights to freedom of movement, education, and other political and economic rights.

This book is the culmination of a decade of research by Human Rights Watch. It details the humanitarian toll of cluster munitions, analyzes the international process that resulted in the treaty successfully banning them, and presents the steps that nations that have signed the convention should take to fulfill its promise.

This 80-page report is the first comprehensive report on cluster munition use by Russia and Georgia in their week-long conflict over the separatist enclave of South Ossetia. Human Rights Watch field investigations in August, September, and October 2008 documented dozens of civilian deaths and injuries from the use of cluster munitions, including casualties after the fighting ended.

This 200-page report details indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks by both Georgian and Russian forces, and the South Ossetian forces' campaign of deliberate and systematic destruction of certain ethnic Georgian villages in South Ossetia. It also describes Russia's failure to ensure public order and safety in areas of Georgia that were under its effective control.

This 102-page report is the most comprehensive account to date of the Georgian government’s attacks on protestors and the raid on Imedi. Witnesses described in detail how police and other law enforcement agents violently dispersed protestors in four separate incidents on November 7.

This 78-page report documents the Russian government’s arbitrary and illegal detention and expulsion of Georgians, including many who legally lived and worked in Russia.

This 101-page report documents the conditions in which the majority of the country’s 13,000 prisoners are being held. In many facilities, prisoners live in severely overcrowded, filthy and poorly-ventilated cells. In the last two years, the prison population has nearly doubled due to the routine use of pretrial detention, even for nonviolent offences.

Since the Rose Revolution, the Georgian government has seemed ready to reform its laws, policies, and practices affecting human rights to bring them into line with European standards. Although the government is displaying the political will for such reforms, past experience suggests that the process will not be easy.

Georgia has a long record of tolerating torture and ill-treatment by law enforcement agents. The new government that came to power after the November 2003 ‘Rose Revolution’ has taken some steps to address such abusive practices, but these efforts have proven inadequate to stem them.

After the November 23, 2003 revolution, leading to the formation of a new government and the election of Mikheil Saakashvili as president, an opportunity has opened to make real progress on human rights in Georgia. The new government must take up this opportunity by making respect for human rights the core of its reform program.

This paper first surveys initiatives taken by U.N., regional, and other intergovernmental bodies in the context of the international campaign against terrorism.

In a report released today, Human Rights Watch documents Georgia's repeal of reforms that would have widened access to the courts to hear torture and other complaints of abuses by the police, procuracy, and security forces.The Georgian parliament repealed these important reforms just weeks after Georgia was voted into the Council of Europe in April 1999.

As a result of the findings contained in this report, Human Rights Watch is calling on the Georgian government to take a number of steps to amend the applicable laws and improve practices so as to safeguard against torture, and to meet United Nations and other international standards regarding fair trials and the treatment of persons held in pre-trial detention. This report reiterates the U.N.