Bachana (Bacho) Akhalaia, a high-ranking official from the former ruling United National Movement (UNM) party, was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for saying during a closed court session that the current government of Georgia should be overthrown.

The verdict was delivered on Monday by Tbilisi City Court Judge Romeo Tkeshelashvili. Local media reported that Akhalaia did not attend the hearing.

Akhalaia also faces charges in a separate case, in which prosecutors accuse him of being the ‘chief organiser’ of the 4 October 2025 protests in Tbilisi, branded as the ‘Peaceful Revolution’. He faces up to nine years in prison if convicted.

It was during a closed hearing in the 4 October-related case that Akhalaia made the remarks which later led to one more charge against him — that of ‘incitement to change the constitutional order of Georgia through violence, or to overthrow state power’.

‘I believe that [the ruling Georgian Dream party founder] Bidzina Ivanishvili should be overthrown’, he said during the hearing, adding:

‘[He] must be overthrown by every possible means. If force is required, then [he] must be overthrown by force. Along with [Georgian Dream’s founder Bidzina] Ivanishvili, Russia’s tentacles in Georgia must also be uprooted as extensively as possible. This is the only solution. It is the only way to end the hell in which Russia has kept us for the past 200 years [...] We will overthrow Ivanishvili — we certainly will’.

He also added that he is confident that ‘the overthrow of this regime’ is the duty of both him and his generation.

Audio of Akhalaia’s speech was published on YouTube on 7 March by his wife and lawyer, Ani Nadareishvili. Two days later, on 9 March, authorities announced the new charge.

At a hearing on 4 June, when Judge Tkeshelashvili asked Akhalaia whether he pleaded guilty, he replied, ‘I don't know’, urging the judge to decide by himself whether the disputed remarks constituted a call to action or merely his opinion, and whether they amounted to a crime.

Akhalaia also reiterated that he viewed the government’s overthrow as the only way out of the country's current situation, saying Georgians were ‘living in an absurdity’ where people could be arrested for standing on a pavement or for social media posts.

Nadareishvili, for her part, said the case amounted to an attempt to ‘criminalise political opinion’.

Akhalaia’s long history in government

During the UNM government, Akhalaia held several senior state positions.

In 2005–2008, he served as head of the Penitentiary Department, and in 2008-2009 as deputy defence minister. From 2009 to 2012, he was defence minister, and in 2012 — just months before the UNM lost power — he was appointed interior minister.

Soon after Georgian Dream came to power in 2012, Akhalaia was detained. In 2013, he was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison over the violent suppression of the 2006 Tbilisi prison riot, which left five people dead; then-President Mikheil Saakashvili later pardoned him.

In 2014, however, the Tbilisi City Court sentenced Akhalaia to 7.5 years in prison for abuse of power in another case, and in 2018 he received another, nine-year sentence in the case concerning the torture of Colonel Sergo Tetradze, who was detained in 2011. According to the Prosecutor General’s Office, Tetradze died without regaining consciousness from acute cardiovascular failure.

Akhalaia pleaded not guilty to all charges.

He was released from prison in 2022 and has largely stayed out of public life.