The Christmas Raid
Christmas night, 25 December 2017. Just before four in the morning, thirty-two officers from Georgia's State Security Service raid a house in the village of Duisi, in the Pankisi Gorge near the Russian border. Their target is a nineteen-year-old named Temirlan Machalikashvili, suspected of supporting an ISIS-linked cell. Two officers enter his bedroom. They shoot him in the head at close range.
The officers said he reached for a grenade under his pillow. His family said he was asleep. No grenade was ever produced in evidence, photographed at the scene, or entered into any official report. He died eleven days later.
His father Malkhaz took the case to the European Court of Human Rights. In Machalikashvili v. Georgia (2022), the court found two violations of Article 2 — the right to life. But the more devastating finding was its second: the investigation had been so inadequate that the question of whether the shooting itself was lawful could never be properly answered. The state had made the truth unreachable. That unreachability was the violation.
Ellis and Maren on what happens when a state investigates itself, and the ECHR says no.
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