A relapse into dark times – the case of Nino Datashvili

It started with a scuffle in the lobby of Tbilisi City Court. On June 9, 2025, activist Nino Datashvili refused to comply with a bizarre warning from court security. The accusation? She had allegedly stood in a spot where standing was forbidden. A verbal confrontation escalated into a brief physical altercation. What followed was a formal charge: assaulting a public official on duty. A trivial incident in any functioning democracy—yet in Georgia, it turned into a Kafkaesque farce with serious consequences. The charge carries a sentence of four to seven years.

The Georgian prosecution then found a new angle: Datashvili’s health. Specifically, her spine—and its allegedly "emotionally unstable" side effects. A court ruling documented by the NGO "Partnership for Human Rights" (PHR) authorized her forced admission to a psychiatric facility. The Georgian justice system—or what remains of it—is now borrowing tactics well-known from Soviet history: repression in a white coat.

From Nino to Nazi – A Dangerous Tradition Lives On

The methods may be more refined, but the logic remains the same. Dissenters are not rebutted—they’re discarded. One of the most disturbing parallels can be found in the case of journalist Nazi Shamanauri. Like Datashvili, she was a defiant woman of principle. Like Datashvili, she sought truth—and ended up institutionalized.

Born in 1940 in Dusheti, Nazi Shamanauri was a journalist, French teacher, and devout Christian. In the Soviet era, she wrote about the suffering of Georgia’s rural poor—an act of courage during a time of brutal censorship. In 1982, she attempted to read a public statement criticizing local abuses in Dusheti. Denied a platform, she raised her voice anyway. Authorities arrested her and forcibly committed her, along with her mother, to a psychiatric hospital.

What followed was torture disguised as treatment. Her diaries, later published under the title "My Truth, My Enemy," describe forced feeding, beatings, heavy sedation, humiliation, isolation, and repeated pressure to recant. She never did. But she did not survive. On January 12, 1983, she was admitted to a hospital unconscious—she died eight days later. Soviet propaganda labeled her mentally ill. Today we know: she wasn’t insane—she was courageous.

And in 2025, her story is no longer just a memory—it is a warning. Same system, different vocabulary.

The Return of Psychiatric Abuse?

Datashvili’s lawyer, Tamari Gabodze, is unequivocal: this is not a medical issue, but a political operation. “The goal is to discredit Nino Datashvili, stigmatize her, and neutralize her activism.” This isn’t an isolated view—none of the defense’s appeals have even been seriously reviewed by Georgian courts.

This is more than a bad omen. It signals the re-establishment of psychiatric repression in Georgia—a practice once confined to Soviet archives. One infamous example is psychiatrist David Magradze, known in the 2000s for issuing dubious diagnoses. In 2009, he declared a 20-year-old schizophrenic based on nothing more than a neck scratch and nervous eye contact. That young man spent three years in forced institutionalization in the notorious Khoni psychiatric hospital.

Now, 16 years later, the same facility is once again weaponized—this time against a woman whose only “crime” was public dissent.

Diagnosis as a Tool of Political Control

If one takes the medical argument in Datashvili’s case seriously, then emotional expression, irritability, or protest may soon qualify as threats to the state. It’s a perverse inversion of medical ethics: what once offered care now enables coercion. Not because of delusional psychosis, but because someone argued with authorities. Being emotional—being human—is pathologized.

The Georgian prosecution cites a 2019 medical note mentioning "emotional instability" as a side effect of spinal issues. This is, of course, not a psychiatric diagnosis. And yet in today’s Georgia, it suffices to justify forced psychiatric evaluation—a practice once perfected in the USSR, and now making a chilling comeback.

Stay Silent, Stay Healthy?

The message to Georgia’s civil society is clear: Speak out, and you’ll be declared ill. Protest, and you’ll be stamped—not on paper, but on your forehead—as "unstable," "dangerous," or "unfit." The stories of Petre Meunargia, Nazi Shamanauri, and Nino Datashvili show how psychiatric abuse has long been one of authoritarianism’s most insidious weapons. It doesn’t kill the body—it kills the soul. And if that’s not enough, it finishes off your career and social life.

Georgia, while branding itself as a “European” country, still reaches deep into the Soviet toolbox of repression.

Stigmatization as Strategy – A Pattern with History

Those who consider Datashvili’s case an isolated incident have not been paying close attention. The strategic use of psychiatric labels to discredit dissent is not a spontaneous outburst—it’s a systematically applied instrument of authoritarian power. The trick is as old as it is sinister: when a courtroom becomes a PR liability, the regime relocates the confrontation to the clinic. There are no cameras there. No audience. No inconvenient questions.

And above all: no rule of law.

The Demonization of a Dissident – A Slow-Motion Campaign

Datashvili was inconvenient. Young, outspoken, uncompromising—and politically unaligned. Unlike many opposition politicians, she had no ties to the regime, no PR handlers, no fear of the streets. Her activism was direct, public, confrontational. And that made her dangerous to a state that prefers to cloak authoritarianism in vague press statements and empty legalisms.

The playbook is classic: first criminalize her, then pathologize her, then isolate her. If the plan works, her political credibility is destroyed—not by what she did, but by what the system says she is.

Europe Must Do More

While the Baltic states—especially Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—have taken firm steps in response to Georgia’s repression by imposing targeted travel bans on complicit judges, prosecutors, and officials, other EU members remain conspicuously silent.

Germany and France, which often speak up for rule of law, must follow suit. There is no need for sweeping sanctions against Georgia—but there must be personal consequences for those orchestrating politically motivated persecution like that of Nino Datashvili.

To tolerate repression without consequences is to enable it.