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.
 

Leading Georgian dissident and writer Irakli Kakabadze (pictured) has been fined 400 Georgian Lari (about $220) after taking part in a protest against the naming of one of Tbilisi's main streets after former US president George W. Bush which featured him reading one of his poems in which he compared leading figures of the Georgian regime to dogs.

On Saturday Kakabadze and others protested against the naming of the main road from Tbilisi's airport to the city centre after the former US president, who was a staunch ally of Mikheil Saakasvili.

News reports say that the protestors painted over the pciture of the ex-president on the street sign (shown).

They say he read a poem "Dogs, dogs": dedicated to interior minister and regime strong man Vano Merabishvili and Zurab Adeishvili, the justice minister who as been previously accused of organising the beatings of protestors.

The police claim the protestors resisted them, a claim denied strenuously by Kakabadze's lawyers. Kakabadze is a leading advocate of Ghandian non-violent protest and has been previously beaten by the police on arrest.

Yesterday's poll from the National Democratic Institute, showing little support for the president's plan to change the constitution to allow him to stay on in power, will have worried the pro-Saakashvili faction inside the ruling party, not least because it reportedly showed that the champion of the "liberal" wing in the ruling bloc, Tbilisi mayor Gigi Ugulava, is a more popular and trusted figure.

But there would be another loser if Misha's plan to stay on in office fails - his old univeristy friend Levan Varshalomidze, the current head of government in the nominally autonomous republic of Adjara.

According to several press reports Varshalomidze is being lined up by Saakashvili to succeed him as president undetr the proposed new constitutional dispensation. Under these proposals the role of president will be diminished to little more than a ceremonial head of state.

Varshalomiodze seems well suited for such a post - as chief of government in Adjara he cuts almost no impression at all and is actually little more than Saakashvili's vice-regent. Certainly Adjara offers no comfort to anyone hoping the Georgian state can improve the chances of national reintegration by showing the Abkhaz and Ossetians that pluralism can flourish inside a unified state. A recent row about his lack of power seems to have been resolved in the favour of the centre of Tbilisi and nothing more has been heard of his demands for more power in Batumi.

Varshalmodize is not just an old friend with Saakashvili: he appears to have once been a business part of Zurab Noghaideli - Saakashvili's longest serving prime minister and now a pro-Moscow opponent of the president. Ironically the liberals in the ruling party accuse Saakashvili and his chief lieutenant, interior minister Vano Merabishvili, of sharing the same fundamental orientation - even if there is clearly no hope of a rapproachement with the Kremlin given the current leadership on either side. 

Mikheil Saakasvili, generally regarded as politically secure after his party's triumph in the 30th May elections suffered an unexpected reverse today when polling for the US-led National Democratic Institute (NDI) showed just 26% - a fraction over one-in four - of Georgian voters wanted to see him stay on in power as Prime Minister at the end of his presidential term.

Saakashvili's court have been pressing hard for constitutional amendments that would significantly downgrade the role of president and instead place most power in the hands of the PM: today the holder of that post is little more than the president's cipher.

The poll showed only 14% supported the idea of a strong prime minister, with 48% supporting a presidential system.

Saakashvili is term-limited and so is unlikely to remain as president after 2013. A "liberal" faction inside the ruling party is said to oppose the shift to a strong prime minister because they want Saakashvili and is interior minister, Vano Merabishvili and Merabishvili's key ally, education minister Dmitry Shashkin, out of the way.

A presidential system may also suit opposition leader Irakli Alasania who may gamble he has the personal qualities and appeal to win in a national run-off. In contrast the parliamentary Christian Democrats, who vie with Alasania's Free Democrats for the position of leading opposition party, may well prefer a strong parliamentary system.

Clearly if a constitutional amendment was put to a popular vote Saakashvili's faction could be in trouble. But it is parliament that has the power to change the constitution.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO's general secretary, has sent a coded warning to Mikheil Saakashvili's regime about the lack of democratic accountability of the armed forces in Georgia - saying that "civil control" was a "necessity" if the country was to make progress towards NATO membership.

Under constitutional changes pushed through in the opening days of Saakashvili's presidency he has absolute personal control over senior military appointments, while later changes made the interior minister and defence minister accountable to him and not the prime minister.

In reality almost all Georgians would acknowledge that the interior minister, Vano Merabishvili, is Saakashvili's key lieutenant in the "force ministries" - effectively controling the defence ministry as well as the large network of interior ministry forces, including the various descendants of the Soviet security organs, such as the Constitutional Security Department, the direct inheritor of the USSR's Committee for State Security (KGB) in the transcaucasian republic.

Under Merabishvili the armed wing of state has essentially acted as though beyond the law and even when senior officials have been caught in acts of murder - as in the case of Sandro Girgvliani - the state, from the prosecutors to the courts, prisons and the president himself have bent over backwards to ensure the punishment was the lightest possible and that the transgressors were released at the earliest possible date.

This level of political manipulation was widely blamed for the fiasco of August 2008 where individual Georgian units fought bravely against Russian attack but were poorly led and directed by politicians playing at generals - Tbilisi mayor Gigi Ugulava (pictured) in particular has been indentified as seeking to insert himself as a military leader before running away when the Russians advanced. Like most armies with weak leadership individual bravery was not enough and the Georgian army cracked: tactical retreat soon became a rout.

However, democratic control and accountability for the interior ministry and the army would also threaten the regime's ability to use force as weapon against political opponents. Georgia is not Russia and opposition figures are, in general, not shot down on the street or made to look like suicides, but that does not mean pressure is not applied by arresting family members or planting drugs on party officials or mounting armed raids on companies associated with opposition to the government (the regime recently had the misfortune to mount such a raid when the American ambassador was on the premises).

It could even mean an end to the Potemkin village of Georgian justice, where distressed suspects are nightly paraded on TV making "confessions" and less than one in two thousand criminal cases ends in an acquittal.