The Christmas Raid

On Christmas night 2017, just before four in the morning, thirty-two officers of Georgia's State Security Service raided a house in Duisi, a village in the Pankisi Gorge near the country's border with Russia. Their target was a nineteen-year-old named Temirlan Machalikashvili, suspected of providing material support to an ISIS-linked cell. Two officers entered his bedroom. Moments later, Temirlan was shot in the head at close range. He died eleven days later without regaining consciousness.

The official account was that he had reached under his pillow for what officers believed to be a grenade. The family account was that he had been asleep, unarmed, when the officers entered. No grenade was ever produced in evidence. No grenade was photographed at the scene. No grenade was referenced in any subsequent internal report. The central object of the Georgian government's justification had, effectively, no material existence in the record.

What the Pankisi Gorge was, and was not

The Pankisi Gorge is a remote valley in eastern Georgia. It has been home, since the 1990s, to a Chechen refugee community that arrived during the wars of that decade. In the 2010s, the area became associated — in security-service reports, in international media, and in government communications — with recruitment for jihadist organisations operating in Syria. The Georgian state's internal narrative of counter-terrorism work in the Gorge drew heavily on this characterisation. The residents of the Gorge often contested it.

What is agreed is that the 2017 raid was large — thirty-two armed officers — disproportionately so, the family and later the European Court of Human Rights would argue, for a single nineteen-year-old asleep in a family home.

The investigation that did not investigate

Malkhaz Machalikashvili, Temirlan's father, filed a criminal complaint seeking to establish what had happened in his son's bedroom. Georgian prosecutors opened, closed, reopened, and closed again two investigations over the following years. Each concluded that the officers had acted lawfully. Each left significant evidentiary gaps. Key witnesses were not interviewed. Forensic questions about the alleged grenade were never resolved. The investigation's conclusions were reachable only because its premises had never been seriously tested.

The ECHR's finding

Malkhaz took the case to the European Court of Human Rights. The court delivered its judgment in Machalikashvili v. Georgia on 23 June 2022. It found two violations of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights — the right to life.

The first violation concerned the planning of the operation. The court held that Georgian authorities had failed to put adequate procedures in place to minimise the risk to life. A four-AM raid, on a sleeping target, with thirty-two officers, and no evidence of an imminent threat proportionate to that force, fell below the standard the Convention requires when the state uses potentially lethal force.

The second, and more significant, violation concerned the investigation itself. The court found that Georgia's inquiry into the death had been so procedurally inadequate that the question of whether the killing itself was lawful could not be answered. The court did not rule that Temirlan had been unlawfully killed. It ruled something stranger and, in its way, more damaging: that the state had made the question unanswerable. That deliberate unreachability — the practical impossibility of ever now establishing the facts — was itself the Convention violation.

This is a distinct and important strand of ECHR Article 2 case law, developed over decades through Turkish, Russian, and other cases involving disputed state killings. The procedural limb of Article 2 — the obligation to conduct an effective investigation — is treated as an independent, free-standing obligation. A state can be held to have violated the right to life not by the killing itself, but by the subsequent refusal to examine the killing properly.

The remedy, such as it is

Georgia was ordered to pay thirty thousand euros in damages. A purely symbolic amount against the loss of a nineteen-year-old son. As of 2025, no new Georgian investigation has been opened into the Duisi raid. Malkhaz Machalikashvili continues his advocacy. The grenade has still not been produced.

What the Christmas Raid case establishes — and what the Strasbourg court has been restating now for more than twenty years — is that the integrity of an investigation is not a procedural nicety. It is the substantive guarantee. When a state investigates itself and declines to do so properly, the right to life has already been violated, regardless of what actually happened in the bedroom.

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Listen to the full story on Courtside Europe, Episode 3. Stream the episode here.