The Parliament deliberated for the I reading and approved the Draft Criminal Procedure Code, submitted for expedited consideration, prohibiting the departure of convicts for financial and economic crimes from the country until the full indemnification of the damage.

“The Draft aims at the refinement of the regulations prohibiting the departure from the country to ensure effective and flexible application of this mechanism for the indemnification of the affected parties”, - the reporter, First Deputy Chair of the Legal Affairs Committee, Tornike Cheishvili noted.

As he elucidated, the amendments offer certain prerequisites to be applied in a cumulative manner: “According to the first precondition, the convict shall be found guilty of committing crimes envisaged under certain Articles of the Criminal Code, specifically, economic and financial crimes, such as: fraud, extortion, embezzlement, appropriation, damage or destruction of items, hiding property, abuse of authority, negligence etc.; the second prerequisite stipulates that the convict shall be the Georgian citizen or a stateless person; yet another pivotal condition is that the affected party shall not in writing waive the prohibition of the convict from departing from Georgia in securement of the compensation for the victim. If all three prerequisites are fulfilled, then the convict shall be prohibited from leaving the country not under the guilty verdict but in an imperative manner on the basis of a respective legal record”.

As per the reporter, the National Enforcement Bureau, in view to ensure the prohibition of departure, shall notify the Interior Ministry about the initiation of the enforcement proceedings, also serving a respective notice to the National Agency for Crime Prevention, Execution of Non-Custodial Sentences and Probation - the agency that ensures the execution of the prohibition through the e-supervision mechanism.

“The exemption from the prohibition shall be based on the notarially certified document that the convict has reimbursed the damage to the affected party in order, as established under the national legislation, or when the affected party refuses to accept the compensation”, - he elucidated.