A 29-year-old Georgian prisoner, Nodar Tatunashvili, has reportedly fallen into a coma at the Vivamedi clinic in Tbilisi after a prolonged hunger strike, with his family alleging medical negligence and the country’s prison authority insisting he repeatedly refused food and treatment. Tatunashvili began refusing solid food on April 1, 2026, consuming only liquids, and was transferred to the private clinic on May 14 for inpatient supervision. Relatives say he slipped out of consciousness about a week later and has not woken since.
The standoff over his care is the latest to land at Vivamedi, a clinic that has become the default stage for Georgia’s most contested prison-health cases. The same venue housed former president Mikheil Saakashvili for years, and his case set the template for the kind of dispute now playing out in public again.
Georgia’s Penitentiary Service Says the Inmate Refused Care
The country’s Special Penitentiary Service, the agency that runs Georgia’s prisons, issued a statement on June 1 responding to the family’s claims. It said Tatunashvili refused food from the start of his strike and, under Georgian law, was within his rights to do so as a conscious adult. The agency framed his decline as the result of his own choices rather than any failure of treatment.
According to the service, the prisoner repeatedly declined laboratory and instrumental examinations, monitoring of his vital signs, and several offers of treatment. He first refused transfer to Penitentiary Medical Institution No. 18, the prison system’s own hospital, and later declined a move to a civilian clinic before eventually agreeing to hospitalization. At the point of transfer from Penitentiary Institution No. 3, the Batumi prison where he was held, officials said he was weakened but still able to move on his own.
The Special Penitentiary Service expresses hope that the life and health of convict Nodar Tatunashvili will not be harmed. He remains under the constant supervision of highly qualified medical personnel.
That statement is where the official account stops. The agency did not address the family’s central allegation: that the prisoner is now in a coma.
A Coma, and a Mother Locked Outside the Ward
The family tells a sharply different story. Relatives say Tatunashvili fell into a coma roughly one week after admission and has remained unconscious, with no clear updates passed to them since. They blame the deterioration on poor care inside the clinic rather than on the strike alone.
His relatives describe a cascade of organ damage. They say his liver was failing, with complications spreading to other organs and the brain, and that his condition forced a move into intensive care. They have also raised pointed concerns about staffing, claiming his blood pressure dropped sharply in the evenings after the attending doctor left for the day.
The family’s specific allegations include:
- That clinic staff did not adequately examine or monitor his worsening condition
- That improper treatment, not the hunger strike by itself, drove the slide toward a coma
- That they were given no reliable information about his status after he lost consciousness
- That his mother was turned away when she tried to see him
His mother put the sense of exclusion plainly. “Today, I secretly came and stood outside,” she said, describing being kept from the ward, adding that staff “could have at least shown me through the window.”
Two Accounts of the Same Hospital Bed
The two narratives barely touch. Where the state describes a patient exercising a legal right to refuse help, the family describes a man failed by the institution meant to keep him alive. The gap matters because, for now, almost nothing in the case is independently confirmed.
| Point in dispute | Special Penitentiary Service | Tatunashvili’s family |
|---|---|---|
| Transfer and condition | Agreed to hospitalization, moved May 14, weakened but able to move independently | Moved only after weeks of strike, with his condition already grave |
| Current state | Under constant supervision of qualified medical staff; coma not addressed | In a coma, unconscious for days, moved to intensive care |
| Cause of decline | Repeatedly refused food, exams and treatment, making adequate care impossible | Improper treatment at the clinic, with liver failure spreading to other organs |
| Access to information | Public statement issued June 1 | No updates given; mother turned away from the ward |
Why Georgia’s Hardest Prison Cases Keep Arriving at Vivamedi
Vivamedi is not a random destination. The Tbilisi clinic has handled a string of high-profile and politically charged inmates whose health became a national argument, and each case followed a familiar arc: a prison strike or medical crisis, a transfer to the same private facility, then weeks of competing claims about who is telling the truth.
The pattern is visible across several recent cases:
- Mikheil Saakashvili, who led Georgia as president from 2004 to 2013, was treated at Vivamedi for more than three years after a hunger strike and health decline following his October 2021 arrest, before he was returned to Rustavi prison in November 2025
- Temur Katamadze, a hunger-striking detainee whom the rights group GYLA (the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association, a legal watchdog) said was moved to the same clinic
- Nodar Tatunashvili, now the latest inmate whose treatment there has triggered a public dispute
Saakashvili’s years at the clinic showed how unresolved these cases tend to stay. His lawyers, the government, and outside doctors offered competing readings of the same patient for months at a time, and even released hospital footage failed to settle the argument. The clinic became less a place of treatment than a stage on which two political camps tested their versions of reality.
Tatunashvili’s case carries a quieter difference. He is not a former head of state, and his demand was modest by comparison: a transfer from Batumi to Tbilisi. That smaller profile is part of why his condition went largely unremarked until relatives began speaking out.
The Legal Clause That Lets the State Step Back
At the center of the official defense sits a single principle. Georgian law holds that a conscious patient has the right to decide whether to accept food and medical treatment, and the Penitentiary Service leaned on exactly that clause in its statement.
On its face, the rule protects autonomy. A prisoner cannot be force-fed or treated against his will while he is lucid, a standard echoed in international medical ethics on hunger strikes. But the same provision can function as a shield for the institution holding him. If a detainee refuses care and then deteriorates, the state can point to the refusal and argue that its hands were tied.
The hard question is what happens after consciousness fades. A coma removes the patient’s ability to consent or refuse anything, which shifts the duty of care squarely back onto the clinic and the prison system. That is precisely the window the family is asking about, and it is the window the official statement does not describe.
Georgia’s Prison Watchdog and a Pattern of Unanswered Cases
Independent oversight of prison medicine in Georgia runs through the country’s Public Defender, the national ombudsman whose monitors visit penitentiary establishments and report on conditions. The office’s Public Defender of Georgia human rights monitoring work has repeatedly flagged healthcare and patient-rights protection as weak points inside the prison system, with the most recent annual report presented to parliament pointing to systemic shortcomings in health provision.
Rights groups have made similar arguments for years. Human Rights Watch publicly pressed for the release of detainees on medical grounds in Georgia during the Saakashvili dispute, and the World Organisation Against Torture has documented concerns over detention practices in Georgia more broadly. The recurring complaint is the same one Tatunashvili’s family voices now: families and lawyers struggle to get straight answers while a prisoner’s health slips.
Georgia’s authorities have shown they can act decisively on prison populations when they choose to, as they did with an earlier mass amnesty for thousands of prisoners. Individual medical cases, by contrast, tend to dissolve into claim and counterclaim, with no neutral finding to close them.
If Tatunashvili recovers, the dispute may fade without anyone establishing what went wrong inside the ward. If he does not, Georgia will be left with another contested death or grave injury at a clinic that has already absorbed too many of them, and a family still standing on the wrong side of the window.
