"I called non-governmental organizations the Gigauri collective, just as they called us the Murusidze collective"| Gvritishvili

"I called the non-governmental organizations the Gigauri collective, just as they called us the Murusidze collective," Judge Dimitri Gvritishvili, a member of the Supreme Council of Justice, said on the air of Imedi TV channel.

"Now you know that Georgia is in the final stage of European integration, on the basis of the association agreement, the last few years there has been a special monitoring to determine whether Georgia will finally join the European Union or not. One of the central topics has always been judicial reform.

A new wave of the so-called campaign has already started by the so called NGOs, civil society. Today I called them the Gigauri collective, as they called us the Murusidze collective. They are collective Gigauri's for me - if you look at it, you will not hear any other opinion from any of them. That their so-called Guru, Eka Gigauri and the rest are playing dice at the same time.

In my opinion, there are 2 motivations: one is purely mercantile: the more apocalyptic picture they paint of the judiciary, the more funding they will get. The second one is a natural control mechanism: they want to take control of the personnel policy to a certain extent," said Gvritishvili.

He also threatened his opponents by "exposing" them:

"We will no longer wait for attacks on us, we will not follow someone else's agenda, we will create our own agenda. We will be proactive, we will expose all those actors who have unhealthy goals in relation to the judiciary, trying to undermine the High Council of Justice, for example, to  cause a split in the judiciary. We unmask such actors with concrete facts and evidence unlike our opponents who have been trying for years to discredit individual judges with baseless accusations," Gvritishvili said.