E/CN.4/2004/63/Add.1 page 18 91. As part of a series of recommendations, the Public Defender’s office believed it was necessary to set up an appropriate governmental facility to look after religious minorities and that the governmental authorities must pay more attention to teaching activities, in particular to foster religious tolerance. 5. Action taken by the authorities in response to the violence 92. The Special Rapporteur has been informed by the authorities that between 1999 and 2003 the investigative departments of the Ministry of the Interior conducted inquiries into 22 criminal cases involving intolerance or religious violence. Of those 22 cases, 8 were forwarded to the prosecutor’s office and 14 were retained at the Ministry. Of the latter, 3 cases have been referred to the courts for prosecution; the investigations into the other 11 have been broken off. The authorities have also told the Special Rapporteur that the great majority of the investigations are concerned with Basil Mkalavishvili or his sympathizers. 93. This being the case, according to information made available to the Special Rapporteur at the time of his visit to Georgia, it would appear that no one has yet been found guilty of religious violence by the Georgian courts. And apart from the case relating to the first violent attack on a religious minority on 17 October 1999, in which the two individuals charged with destruction of property were ultimately acquitted, no judgement on the merits - not even an interim one - of any act of religious violence committed since October 1999 seems to have issued from a Georgian judicial body. 94. The Special Rapporteur has also been informed that at every hearing of the court dealing with the Mkalavishvili affair, the courtroom has been full of Mkalavishvili’s supporters and the atmosphere has been intimidating. On numerous occasions, sympathizers are said to have threatened the claimants for civil indemnification, their lawyer and even the judges. Members of human rights organizations and a reporter attending the trial were physically attacked by sympathizers. To date, the authorities have not taken appropriate steps to secure the premises so that, for example, the alleged victims can attend the proceedings. 95. The authorities are at pains to point out that the police and other services are also supposed to try to ease tensions between the majority of the population and religious minorities to act as go-betweens. They point out in this connection that religious minorities, the Jehovah’s Witnesses in particular, are guilty of an “enormous amount” of provocation. They refer, for example, to the insistent way in which Jehovah’s Witnesses try to enter people’s homes in order to spread their message, or to their alleged habit of deliberately choosing to gather in places where there are nothing but members of the Orthodox Church, knowing that they risk being attacked. They do not, however, cite any physical action which the Jehovah’s Witnesses have committed. 96. Last, the authorities have told the Special Rapporteur that in cases where the police have not acted in accordance with the rules or have deliberately refrained from intervening, those at fault have been individually punished. In particular, the Minister of the Interior dismissed two police officers and reprimanded two other senior officials for failing to take timely action during the events of 24 January 2003 (see above) when the police had been notified two days beforehand that the service was to take place and that the church would need protecting.