What Article 159⁴ prohibits
Article 159⁴ of the Code of Administrative Offences makes it an offence to advertise, in any form, infant artificial feeding products, feeding bottles with teats, and pacifiers. The article names three product groups expressly.
- Infant artificial feeding products;
- feeding bottles with teats;
- pacifiers.
The wording "advertising of any kind" is broad, and the article itself lists no channels, formats or audiences: the text draws no distinction between television, print, a shop window and an online placement. Nor does it create any exception based on the size or duration of the advertisement. That breadth is what makes the question hard in practice: the decisive issue is almost always whether a particular piece of material amounts to advertising of one of those three products.
The sanction
The article sets out two steps, and in both cases the penalty is a range rather than a fixed sum.
- Advertising of any kind of the listed products — a fine of GEL 250 to GEL 500;
- the same act committed repeatedly within one year — a fine of GEL 500 to GEL 700.
Two things are worth holding on to. First, because the sanction is a range, the specific amount is set within that range, so the figure is not predetermined by the article. Second, for repetition the article expressly names a period of one year — it is one of the relatively few provisions where the timeframe is written into the text itself.
That one-year period is decisive in practice, because it is what separates the two ranges. On the wording of the article, the higher range of GEL 500 to GEL 700 applies only to an act committed repeatedly within one year. Where an authority applies that range, it is therefore relying on an earlier episode and treating the new act as having occurred within a year of it. Both dates matter and both have to be established. If the earlier episode falls outside the one-year period, the basis for the higher range no longer follows from the text.
Who it applies to
The text of the article makes the advertising itself the offence and does not define a separate category of responsible person. It does not distinguish between a manufacturer, an importer, a distributor, a retail outlet, an agency and a disseminator.
Responsibility in a given episode is therefore established from the facts: who commissioned the material, who produced it, and who placed it. This is one of the main points on which such cases are contested, which is why contracts and placement records matter from the very first day. The article also does not name the authority that examines the offence, so that too has to be read from the document issued in your case rather than assumed.
What counts as "advertising" here
Article 159⁴ does not itself define advertising. It uses the term but contains no definition of it, which means the definition has to be found outside this article, in the relevant provisions of Georgian legislation, and the disputed material has to be measured against that definition rather than against an intuition.
The practical consequence is that assumption is unhelpful in either direction — neither that a piece of material is automatically an advertisement, nor that it is obviously not one. A significant proportion of cases in this area stand or fall on exactly that characterisation.
It is worth registering at the outset what Article 159⁴ does not contain. There is no definition of advertising, no list of channels or formats, no exception based on scale or duration, and no separate rule on whom an episode is attributed to. The answers to those questions therefore lie outside the article — in other provisions of the legislation and in the facts of the case.
What you can do, and where a lawyer changes the outcome
If a decision imposing a fine has already been issued, it helps to break the matter down into separate questions rather than treating it as a single verdict.
- Whether the material concerns any of the three products the article lists.
- Whether the particular material qualifies as advertising at all.
- Whether you are the person to whom the episode can properly be attributed.
- Whether this is a first episode or one committed repeatedly within one year — that is what decides between the GEL 250 to GEL 500 range and the GEL 500 to GEL 700 range.
- What reasoning supports the specific amount chosen within the applicable range.
The practical side matters just as much. Disputed material has often already been taken down by the time a case reaches a hearing, so its exact content and date should be captured promptly — by screenshot, photograph or recording. The same applies to the placement history: which channel, over what period, and on whose order the material appeared.
A decision can be contested. The deadline and the body that hears the complaint depend on which authority decided the case; Article 159⁴ does not regulate that, so the procedure has to be read off the decision itself rather than assumed.
What to bring
Collect everything that shows what was published, where, and on whose instructions.
- A copy of the disputed material — text, image or recording — with its date.
- The channel it was placed on and the period of placement.
- Contracts with the agency, the medium or the platform.
- Documents concerning any earlier episode, if the authority relies on repetition.
- The decision imposing the fine and proof of when it was served.