Khatia Dekanoidze (, ; born 20 January 1977) is a Georgian politician who served as Minister of Education and Science in 2012 and as a Member of Parliament from 2020 to 2024, as well as a former Ukrainian official, serving as Chief of the National Police of Ukraine in 2015–2016.
Launching her career following the Rose Revolution of 2003, Dekanoidze first served as an official within the Ministry of Internal Affairs and as a diplomat, before being appointed as head of the Police Academy to oversee law enforcement recruitment reforms. In 2012, she became head of the National Examination Center and Minister of Education and Science in the last months of the Saakashvili presidency. Following UNM's loss in the 2012 parliamentary elections, she joined the opposition, before moving to Ukraine in 2015, where she was appointed as Chief of the National Police under during the presidency of Petro Poroshenko.
Returning to Georgia in 2016, she was elected to Parliament in 2020 and joined the legislature in May 2021 after a boycott in the midst of a political crisis. She served as Chairwoman of the UNM Faction in the Parliament, the only opposition faction in the legislature, from May 2021 to February 2023. In a row with her party, she left the United National Movement on 24 March 2023.
Personal life Khatia Dekanoidze was born on 20 January 1977, in Tbilisi, at the time the capital of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. She studied international relations and diplomacy and received her bachelor's degree from Tbilisi State University in 1999. In parallel, she also received training from the Central European University in Vienna, as well as the US-based RAND Corporation.
During a speech at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, she would state:
Biography Joining the Saakashvili administration Dekanoidze joined the public service following the Rose Revolution of 2003 that brought to power the young pro-Western government of Mikheil Saakashvili. Fresh of a training from the US intelligence-linked RAND Corporation, she was named Head of Administration of the Ministry of State Security of Georgia under the leadership of Irakli Okruashvili, which eventually became the Ministry of Internal Affairs under the powerful Vano Merabishvili. Holding the position from 2004 to 2005, she oversaw some of the most well-known reforms of the agency, which culminated with the mass firing of thousands of police officers in an attempt to purge law enforcement from corruption. This time also coincided with a rise in tensions between the central government and the secessionist authorities of South Ossetia, with the MIA playing a major role in the developments.
She briefly joined the diplomatic sector, working at the Georgian Embassy in Washington, DC from 2005 to 2007.
In May 2007, she was appointed rector of the newly created Police Academy of Georgia. Her appointment was meant to enact reforms into the law enforcement recruitment procedures. In 2022, Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili would accuse Dekanoidze of playing a large role in the controversial treatment of prisoners, which included alleged human rights abuses and potential torture, even though his statement has not been corroborated by other sources, including investigations launched after Saakashvili's defeat She held the post until May 2012. and has been considered as an attack based on her role as opposition leader.
Minister of education On 30 May 2012, Dekanoidze was appointed as Director of the National Examination Center of the Ministry of Education and Science of Georgia, an office in charge of overseeing university entrance exams and teacher certifications. She was appointed to replace Maia Miminoshvili, whose dismissal after her son attended an opposition campaign rally caused a large controversy during the 2012 parliamentary election. She had to face the protest resignation of 70 staff members upon her taking office, while ensuring the proper holding of the national exams set within weeks of her appointment.
On 28 June, seventeen examination centers were opened for 47,500 students and 40,000 teachers. These exams were planned to be the last single, standardized testing in Georgia's education system, as the NEC was planning to launch a reform for 2013 and introduce an "8+1 system", featuring eight high school graduation exams and one general knowledge paper for graduating students. Critics like Miminoshvili claimed that dropping the standardized testing system would risk lowering the quality of students entering universities.
On 4 July, after just one month in charge of the NEC, she was appointed to lead the Ministry of Education and Science in the new cabinet of Prime Minister Vano Merabishvili, replacing Dimitri Shashkini. Her appointment was meant to symbolize the new high priority status of education reform for the Saakashvili government, as Dekanoidze at the time benefited from high approval ratings due to her past as a lead police reformer. However, her term ended in October when the United National Movement lost the parliamentary election and the new Georgian Dream government replaced her with philosopher Giorgi Margvelashvili.
Chief of Ukrainian Police
After the Saakashvili-led UNM became an opposition party, Dekanoidze distanced herself from national politics, working briefly for the Center for European Policy Analysis and an adviser to the U.S. Department of Justice's International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program. Between 2013 and 2014, she served as Dean of the private Caucasus University in Tbilisi. During the 2014 local elections, she was UNM's nominee for Mayor of the Qvareli Municipality, where she was defeated in a runoff against GD's Ilia Mzekalashvili with only 20% of the vote.
Following the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine and Petro Poroshenko's election as President of Ukraine, she became one of Saakashvili's close protégées to join him as he took a leadership role in the new pro-Western government of Kyiv. In 2015, she was granted the Ukrainian citizenship just as Saakashvili was appointed Governor of the Odesa Oblast, formally at the request of Internal Affairs Minister Arsen Avakov, in whose cabinet she first served as an adviser. On 4 November 2015, she was appointed by President Poroshenko as the first Chief of the National Police of Ukraine, a position newly created as part of MIA reforms. She took over Ukrainian law enforcement at a time when it had small public approval, crime was sharply rising, most police officers were without full equipment, and corruption remained strongly entrenched. In March 2016, she dismissed the head of the local police division of Vinnytsia after it was discovered he had been backing separatism in Eastern Ukraine. According to later reports by some Ukrainian media outlets, Oleksandr Tereschuk, the dismissed head of the police division of Kyiv, planned large-scale protests by police officers against her.
Dekanoidze's main task was to reform the corrupt and inefficient law enforcement agency. Within four months, she had replaced 80% of senior management in Kyiv and up to 60% of regional police leaders by requiring a recertification training that most top brass failed. She appointed mainly new faces to replace them, like Andriy Kryshchenko (known for his role in the battle for Horlivka during the 2014 pro-Russian offensive in the Donbas) as head of the Police of Kyiv, and former Georgian MIA official Giorgi Lortkipanidze as head of the Police of Odesa. She launched an entirely new patrol police in 29 cities in the first half of 2016, a mobile police car program in Kyiv, a River Police Patrol on the Kyiv section of the Dnieper river, and enhanced patrol units in the capital in October 2016. She also launched a pilot program to send traffic violations to people instead of only relying on police stops. In July 2016, she declared having launched a war on crime and another one on corruption and through a new vetting process, fired more than 5,600 law enforcement officers (or about 6% of the total police force). During her term, public polls showed improvements in public trust towards the police.
In June 2016, the first-ever Kyiv Pride parade took place despite threats by far-right organizations, as Dekanoidze deployed 7,000 police officers and led the operation that arrested 50 radicals during the parade. In July, she also led efforts to protect a controversial Orthodox religious procession, even installing metal detectors along the path of the procession. When police officers beat a man to death in Kryve Ozero, she personally spearheaded the investigation into the murder and disbanded the local police station entirely.
Well-known Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet was murdered in a car explosion on 20 July 2016. Leading the investigation, Dekanoidze negotiated for the FBI's involvement in the investigation, while the National Police classified documents related to the case for national security purposes. She called him a personal friend and helped set up a special inter-agency group between the National Police and the SBU to investigate his death. Details surrounding the death of the journalist remain unknown to this day and some evidence point to the involvement of Belarusian intelligence.
As the rift between Saakashvili and Poroshenko became obvious, so was Dekanoidze's relationship with the Ukrainian government. In a September 2016 report to the Verkhovna Rada, she called on increased funding as police officers lacked uniforms and equipment. Days after Saakashvili's resignation as Governor of Odesa, she resigned on 14 November and was formally dismissed by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine two days later. In her departure, she complained that her powers were insufficient to make significant changes and that pressure from government officials and MPs was too great. Her deputy Vadym Troyan was appointed Acting Chief, while she stated that reforms ended with her departure.
She soon returned to Georgia and had her citizenship reinstated in May 2017.
In Georgia's opposition 2020 Parliamentary elections Back in Georgia, she joined the non-governmental and academic sector, working as an OSCE expert on police reform from 2017 to 2018, a Marshall Security Center fellow between 2017 and 2019, and an expert for the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs from 2018 to 2019. Politically, she remained aligned with UNM, becoming one of its largest donors. In March 2017, her son was arrested for alleged drug use, an arrest she dubbed "politically-motivated", as it happened during other high-profile, opposition-related drug arrests.
On 26 August 2020, Dekanoidze was nominated by UNM as its nominee for the Parliamentary Majoritarian District of Isani in Tbilisi, a nomination that led to controversy within the Georgian opposition as the latter had previously agreed on Giorgi Vashadze of the Strategy Aghmashenebeli party as a joint opposition candidate two months prior. At the time, 30 opposition parties, including UNM, had signed an agreement on fielding joint candidates for the 2020 parliamentary elections and Vashadze accused her and her party of violating that agreement. Like the rest of her party, she backed Mikheil Saakashvili as the party's prime ministerial candidate (despite his pending legal cases in Georgia and his exile from the country) and was expected to be appointed as Minister of Internal Affairs in case of an opposition victory.