The current head of Georgia, Salome Zurabishvili, stated that the decision on whether to pardon the imprisoned ex-president of the country Mikheil Saakashvili or not is her moral responsibility and no one can influence this. Previously, she had strongly rejected the possibility of a pardon.

“From a reputation point of view, it would be much better if Saakashvili were somewhere else. Its conclusion is a government decision. There are many ways in which other countries have solved these problems - house arrest, extradition. What we see now, what we saw under different regimes, the trend of human rights violations in prisons - we saw and experienced all this during Saakashvili’s reign. So he's in jail for real reasons. This does not mean that the humanitarian point of view should not be protected and respected, I watched very closely what was happening to him in prison,” Zurabishvili said during a discussion organized at the British Royal Institute of International Affairs.

The Georgian authorities are interested in reducing the number of prisoners, but this will not affect Saakashvili, the Speaker of the Georgian Parliament Shalva Papuashvili noted the day before. Tbilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze, in turn, recently stated that Saakashvili will be released after serving his sentence for the crimes committed.