When the court itself breaks the law

In this case the court plainly breached elementary principles of procedural law.

The law is unambiguous. When a defendant receives a claim, it has a strictly defined period in which to file a response. Failure to meet that deadline carries a specific legal consequence.

That, at least, is how it is supposed to work.

In our case, events unfolded as follows:

We asked the court not to accept the late response and to apply the consequences the law provides for. The court refused. We have received no written reasons explaining how a document filed out of time came to be accepted.

So: no ruling extending the deadline exists; the court never considered the request; the deadline it had set expired; and yet the late response was accepted, while our lawful request was refused.

In case №2/30846-25 the claimant is British-Georgian Academy LLC and the defendant is Georgia Education Group LLC. Our claim asks for Georgia Education Group, the Academy's 70% partner, to be expelled from the company.

About six months later, a counterclaim against Natia Janashia was brought in the same case.

This is where the question arises.

Under Article 188 of the Civil Procedure Code of Georgia, only the defendant may bring a counterclaim. In this case the defendant is Georgia Education Group LLC.

Yet in the counterclaim as filed, the claimant is again named as British-Georgian Academy LLC, and the defendant as Natia Janashia.

The result is the following procedural situation:

So British-Georgian Academy LLC is the claimant in both the original claim and the counterclaim.

We put precisely this point to the court and asked for the counterclaim to be left without consideration. The court refused our motion and admitted the claim to proceedings.

The court has provided no written reasons explaining on what legal basis this claim can be treated as a "counterclaim" when it was not brought by the defendant to the original claim.

This is not merely a technical detail. It is a fundamental question: who does the law give the right to bring a counterclaim, and can a court set that rule aside and allow a practice contrary to the law without proper reasons?

In the previous entry we set out why the admission of the counterclaim makes no legal sense. But there is a second problem in this case, no less important: to this day the court has given us no written answer to the question of what legal basis it admitted that claim on.

We have asked the court for reasons more than once, orally and in writing. We want to know what legal logic the court relied on: did it apply the rule on derivative claims, did it grant a particular party's motion, or did it proceed on some other basis unknown to us? We have still had no answer.

This matters as a point of principle, because giving reasons for a decision is not a formality. It goes directly to a party's right to defend its interests properly and to make effective use of the right of appeal. If a party does not know the court's reasoning, it plainly becomes impossible to prepare a well-founded and complete appeal for the higher court.

There is one more thing worth noting. On almost every question of real importance, the judge left the courtroom to reach her decision. She is of course fully entitled to do so. But if a question is difficult enough to require retiring to consider it, that makes it all the more necessary that the parties afterwards receive full legal reasons for the decision. In our case that is precisely what did not happen.

Despite this, Judge Ketevan Kurtskhalia not only failed to issue a reasoned ruling — according to what our side recorded at the hearing, when our lawyers asked her once again for a written explanation, she stated that she did not intend to prepare written reasons on the matter.

What we are left with is a situation in which the court admitted the counterclaim, refused our motion, and at the same time directly declined to give written reasons for its own decision.