Further evidence of the failure and slow collapse of Georgia's libertarian political experiment - promoted with such gusto as little as a year ago by Mikheil Saakashvili - has come with the introduction of new regulations for higher education institutions in the country.

From yesterday market forces alone are no longer enough to determine the quality of higher education and a new state regulatory body has taken charge of assuring quality in the university sector and it has become illegal to claim to be a university without state authorisation.

It is only a few months ago that libertarians, such as Dan Hannan MEP (pictured) were claiming Georgia was the proof that their economic and philosophical outlook was working miracles - but most of their claims were founded on a distortion of the facts, or plain untruths and since then Georgia has, at an accelerating speed, moved away from the most radical proposals.

The Georgian chapter of the international writers' association PEN has stepped up its campaign for international recognistion of what it describes as a "bute violation of the right of expression and free speech" after what it says was the arrest of three poets for reading their own and Walt Whitman's verses at a protest against the naming of one of Tbilisi's major streets in honour of George W Bush.

The three - Shota Gagarin, Aleksi Chigvinadze and Irakli Kakabadze - do not deny that they were involved in defacing the over-sized street sign that features a picture of George Bush: though that is not an arrestable offence in Georgian law and, in any case, they say the police were not present when it took place so could not have judged who was responsible.

Instead the three were charged and convicted under article 173 of the Georgian criminal code - which forbids serious resistance to the police, such as resisting arrest. However the whole event was filmed and it is absolutely clear the three co-operated fully with their arrest. The police have also claimed the three disobeyed a police order not to block traffic but again the three respond that the video shows they did not block traffic and merely read their poems while standing on a traffic island.

The PEN statement reads:

In an extraordinary statement Georgia's interior minister Vano Merabishvili has admitted to the Economist  that there is neither rule of law nor judicial independence in Georgia and that, instead, the outcome of legal processes are decided by government.

The Economist calls his statement: "all the more dangerous for being persuasive"

Merabishvili's comment - that the legal system is too weak to left to decide the law and therefore it falls on government to dispense "justice" comes towards a lengthy profile piece which first praises the achievements of the Rose Revolution:

Today Georgia has reinvented itself as the star of the Caucasus. It is less corrupt than most former Soviet republics and one of the easiest places in the world to do business, according to the World Bank. Its liberalised economy has weathered Russian embargoes, and the state held together during the war with Russia. Its police do not take bribes and electricity is no longer a luxury. Most important, people are no longer surprised by such success. The biggest transformation is in their minds.

But then goes on to warn of how what some have called the "post modern authoritarianism" of Saakashvili is now damaging Georgia's prospects:

On paper Georgia has all the institutions proper to a democracy. In practice few of them enjoy real power. Parliament, dominated by Mr Saakashvili’s United National Movement party, has become little more than a rubber stamp. The police and judiciary are beholden to politicians. Key decisions are taken by a circle of insiders whose influence often extends far beyond their job titles. Democratic procedure is often sacrificed to expediency—catastrophically so in the case of Mr Saakashvili’s decision two years ago to attack South Ossetia with heavy artillery fire, giving Russia the excuse it needed to invade ...

...Mr Saakashvili is more a moderniser than a democrat. Yet in order for his reforms to become irreversible, Georgia needs strong democratic institutions; above all an independent judiciary and the rule of law. Mr Merabishvili argues that these cannot be simply decreed; they need to become entrenched tradition, recognised by Georgian society as a whole. So for the time being, he believes, it is the government that is best equipped to administer justice. This argument is all the more dangerous for being persuasive.

Too much personal power is concentrated in the hands of Mr Saakashvili and Mr Merabishvili, his feared interior minister. That is ominous for a country where power has not been transferred peacefully since independence. A set of proposed constitutional changes would shift more power to parliament and its nominated prime minister. But Mr Saakashvili’s critics say that discussion of the proposed reforms has been limited. They fear that the president will follow the example of Vladimir Putin and stay on as prime minister when his term expires in 2013. If he does, he risks destroying his own legacy.
 

Anger at the treatment of refugees - who have faced a government campaign to deport them from Tbilisi - and from street traders, who have seen the police attempt to drive them into closed and regulated markets, boiled over today outside the parliament building in central Tbilisi.

Police attempted to arrest protestors - a move the protestors say was itself unlawful as they had sought the appropriate permissions, only for the protestors to resist and a large brawl to break out.

The events appear to be unreported - so far - by leading TV channel Rustavi 2, but Maestro have broadcaste extensive coverage (see video).

After a period of relative social peace in the capital the scenes are a reminder of the Saakashvili government's ability to upset its own apple cart very quickly.

Refugees, who have often been living in Tbilisi for close to two decades following the civil wars of the early 1990s, are being ejected from public;y-owned buildings with just five days notice as the government attempts to return momentum to its privatisation programmem given its fiscal crisis.

Street traders are subject to the same pressures: few if any of them pay tax on unregulated street trading and the government is trying to end that. The traders counter that they are often in the direst poverty and simply cannot afford to pay the fees needed to hold down a pitch in a regulated market place.

August is traditionally a quiet time in Georgia and Georgian politics but whether the current round of disturbances represents a move towards a wider social confontation or just a temporary scuffle remains to be seen.

The authorities could back down but that means retreating on the economic front. But the lack of heated rhetoric from Saakashvili about how the protestors are spies or dupes of the Kremlin - his standard response to any criticism - suggests the authorities are not yet willing to press home their monopoly of force to settle the situation either.

Georgia's official human rights defender Giorgi Tugushi says that the treatment in police custody of arrested poet Irakli Kakabadze shows "signs of a crime" and has called on the public prosector to investigate police behaviour, reports civil.ge.

Kakabadze and two others were arrested after defacing a street sign in honour of George W Bush and calling for the street - on the main route into Tbilisi from the international airport - to be named after American poet Walt Whitman. When the police turned up the protestors began reading poems -with Kakabadze reading his own "Dogs, dogs" which is dedicated to the interior and justice ministers.

The whole event was videoed and the three can be seen co-operating with the police over their arrest, but were all later charged with resisting arrest. Their defence lawyers say the judge did not even bother to examine the video evidence when finding them guilty.

Kakabadze says he was beaten by the police and the ombudman confirms he was suffering from injuries while in custody - and plainly those injuries did not exist at the time of his arrest.