On July 16, 2003, seven members of the United National Movement parliamentary faction began a hunger strike inside the Ministry of Justice, demanding payment of overdue pensions. Among them were Koba Davitashvili, Gocha Jojua, and Zviad Dzidziguri. Two days later, five additional party members in Kutaisi joined the protest.

The dispute began several months earlier when, at the initiative of the National Movement, pensioners from Samtredia filed a lawsuit against the government, seeking unpaid pensions from 1998–2000. Their lawyer was Koba Davitashvili himself. On April 21, 2003, the Samtredia District Court ruled in favor of the pensioners, ordering the Unified Social Insurance Fund and the Ministry of Finance to pay 148,000 GEL in back pensions.

Encouraged by this decision, 2,144 pensioners from Kutaisi filed similar lawsuits, which the Kutaisi District Court also upheld, ordering payments totaling about 215,000 GEL. Despite the legal victories, the pensioners never received their money—the Ministry of Justice failed to enforce the court’s ruling.

On July 30, President Eduard Shevardnadze publicly criticized the court’s decisions, urging judges not to accept similar lawsuits in the future: “Now that such a precedent has been set, every pensioner will start filing claims. These judges are appointed by me, and I have a moral right to demand this from them,” he said.

At the time, the average monthly pension in Georgia was only 14 GEL. The National Movement strategically focused on pensioners’ hardships ahead of the upcoming elections. In response, President Shevardnadze accused the protesting MPs of “pre-election hysterical populism,” mockingly adding that “the hunger strikers simply want to lose weight, since their protest has no real basis.”

The hunger strike drew strong support from pensioners themselves, who joined the National Movement on July 21 for a rally outside the Ministry of Justice, demanding both pension payments and the government’s resignation.

The protest ended on July 27, after President Shevardnadze signed a decree authorizing the repayment of pension arrears. According to the International Monetary Fund’s recommendations, the government was to settle pension debts by 2008, partly through the distribution of bonds to pensioners.

Although the government began repaying the arrears, reports from the time indicate that pensioners who had won their cases in court were excluded from the payouts. Officials feared that honoring those rulings would set a legal precedent and force the state to pay tens of thousands of other pensioners who had already filed similar lawsuits. Deputy State Minister Akaki Zoidze warned that “the precedent would be contagious.”