Parliament to Fill Posts
The newly elected parliament will hold a second session this week to fill some posts in the legislative body.
MPs Givi Targamadze and Khatuna Gogorishvili will reportedly retain their posts as chairpersons of the committees for defense and security and procedural issues, respectively.
Giorgi Gabashvili, ex-deputy chief of the president’s administration, is expected to be nominated chairman of the committee for education, science, culture and sport. He served as minister of culture and sport before January 2008.
Zurab Melikishvili, the ruling party’s secretary general, is expected to take the post of chairman of the committee for regional policy, self-governance and mountainous regions.
The names of other presumptive nominees for chairmen of the remaining parliamentary committees still haven’t been reported.
It is rumored that the ruling party is ready to offer the post of chairman of the parliamentary committee for human rights to Gia Tortladze – a lawmaker who was elected on the opposition coalition’s ticket. Tortladze, however, has strongly denied that. Tortladze, along with another lawmaker from the opposition coalition, Gia Tsagareishvili, said on June 9 they were quitting the bloc.
The ruling party is considering having four vice-speaker posts and is reportedly ready to offer three of them to different opposition groups – the opposition coalition; the Christian-Democratic Party and the Labor Party. The opposition bloc and the Labor Party, however, have already rejected the offer, saying they were committed to boycotting the new parliament.
Mikheil Machavariani, Gigi Tsereteli, Rusudan Kervalishvili and Temur Charkviani are expected to be nominated as vice-speakers. Machavariani and Tsereteli have already held this post in the previous parliament. Rusudan Kervalishvili is a ruling party majoritarian MP elected in the Tbilisi Samgori single-mandate constituency and Temur Charkviani – a majoritarian MP elected in the Batumi single-mandate constituency of the Adjarian Autonomous Republic.
Meanwhile, the opposition coalition has asked the Central Election Commission to annul its party list of MP candidates. The move is a further reiteration by the coalition that it was not going to enter Parliament. Ordinarily when a lawmaker elected on the party-list system quits Parliament, the candidate next to him or her in the list takes the seat. The annulment of the party list, however, does not mean the candidates endorsed in the parliament on the coalition’s joint ticket are giving up their MP mandates. They should individually make an official appeal for the cancellation of their MP mandate to the parliamentary chairman.
At least three lawmakers elected on the coalition’s ticket have said they would not renounce their MP mandates – Gia Tortladze, Gia Tsagareishvili and Paata Davitaia. Jondi Bagaturia, leader of Georgian Troupe party – part of the coalition – seems undecided.
