Georgia falters on legal reforms

Among former Soviet republics undergoing Western legal reform, Georgia has long been a star student, winning extensive financial aid from the West. But now the star pupil is faltering.

The latest trouble in establishing rule of law comes from an unexpected source: Georgian lawyers themselves, in particular those who worked during the Soviet regime.

"This is a fight over who will control the bar association – it's really between the old guard, the old psychology, and a new movement," says Gia Getsadze, an attorney working for a USAID-funded legal reform project.

The conflict is the most recent sign of trouble in the overall reform process in this strategically important country, recipient of more than a billion dollars in aid from the US alone since 1992.

Aimed at discarding practices leftover from the Soviet past, judicial reforms include such basic Western concepts as an independent judiciary and the protection of the rights of the accused. Under a new law on the bar, all attorneys are supposed to pass new exams aimed at raising standards in Georgia, where bribe-taking has traditionally been the most common way of settling legal disputes.

Last month, reformers managed to defeat a legislative attempt to "grandfather" current lawyers out of having to take the exam. If successful, the amendment would have opened the door to domination of the bar by the Collegium of Advocates, the Soviet-era public defenders organization, to which most of the country's lawyers belong – an organization widely seen as corrupt.

"We may have won this battle, but the war is definitely not over yet," says Carolyn Clark Campbell, the country representative for the American Bar Association. "The Collegium does not want to lose power, and if they succeed in hanging on, it will stop the legal reform process," says Mr. Getsadze.

The Collegium's president, Nugzar Birkaia, rejects any notion that his organization is trying to preserve a corrupt status quo. "Of course that is not true," he said in an interview in his office in the Ministry of Justice.

In years past Georgia won praise for overhauling its Soviet legal system: A new constitution was adopted in 1995, followed by eight new codes, including an administrative code - which lays out rules for relations between the government and its citizens – and a freedom of information act more liberal than its US model.

These achievements were the handiwork of young reformers brought into government by President Eduard Shevardnadze, after his resounding electoral victory in 1995 for ending a civil war. But in recent years, most of these reformers have left government, disillusioned with what they say is Shevardnadze's tolerance of corruption in his administration.

"I left his office when I saw no understanding of the basic concept of the rule of law.... He cannot put himself under the law or Constitution," says Dato Usupashvili, formerly the president's legal adviser, who now works with a USAID-funded legal reform project.

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