Georgia pardons prisoners

The President of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze, has granted an amnesty to nearly four-hundred prisoners as a goodwill gesture, and to relieve prison overcrowding.

A security council official said the majority of those pardoned were first time offenders serving sentences of five years or less in labour correction camps.

She said the releases represented the second phase of work by Georgia's amnesty commission; the first phase had led to more than one-thousand-three- hundred pardons by November.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service