Georgia's new ombudsman Georgiy Tugushi is following the example of his predecessor Sozar Subari who was liberal of criticism of the authorities and turned to the opposition after he left office. The official Tbilisi did not conceal its hopes that Tugushi would not support the opposition so openly. However, judging by the ombudsman's first report, the authorities are going to face another struggle.

Some of these days, new people's defender of Georgia Georgiy Tugushi fulfilled his promised and submitted the report prepared by his predecessor Sozar Subari to the parliament. The point at issue was the situation with the human rights in the country in the first half of 2009. This period was marked with domestic political crisis in the country: there were a lot of meetings and protest actions.

This time, the authorities did not venture to use any force as they did in 2007. However, there were plenty of incidents: arrests of the oppositionists, coming down hard on the oppositional media, accusations of treason and cooperation with the Russian special services. The number of events that happened within the last half-year would be enough to write a multivolume political detective novel. As to the authorities, they hoped that the ombudsman's report would be rather reserved in the context of political lull.

Nevertheless, today, the international observers are stating that the situation in Georgia got more or less stable. For example, such statement was made by EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus Peter Semneby in his interview to newspaper News Time.

Before that, international organization Reporters Without Borders had stated that the situation with the mass media freedom in Georgia has improved and that Georgia has "stepped over" 39 positions in the rating of this organization, having taken the 81^st place.

However, the ombudsman's report speaks quite on the contrary. As underlined by Tungushi, the situation is getting worse in Georgia in respect of the freedom of speech, while the law-enforcement authorities commit violence and treat the people humiliatingly, as RIA Novosti reports.

The report even caused a kind of confrontation between the people's defender and the Ministry for Sentence Serving and Probation. "For today, the system of serving one's sentence is one of the most problematic fields in Georgia", - Tugushi stated, according to Civil.ge

One of the current problems outlined in the report lies in the overcrowded prison cells, poor health care provided to the prisoners, as well as prison abuse. The report says that according to the information provided by Ministry for Sentence Serving and Probation, 54 prisoners died within the reporting period.

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