UN General Assembly
2015

Even with all those achievements, we still face challenges to our security at home. I regret that since my last address to the United Nations (see A/69/PV.14), the Russian Federation signed the so-called integration treaties with Sukhumi and Tskhinvali. Russia continues to illegally extend its control over Georgian sovereign territory. I condemn that creeping annexation and Russia’s disregard for international law. A tragic result is that the local population in the occupied territories of Georgia are robbed of the fundamental rights of a free people. De facto authorities recently undertook additional measures to suppress still further the Georgians’ right to be educated in their mother tongue. The freedom of movement and the basic rights of a free nation are crushed, along with the hopes and dreams of hundreds of thousands of victims of ethnic cleansing who only wish to return to their places of origin.