Background
Tkeshelashvili was born on May 23, 1977 in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.
Tkeshelashvili was born on May 23, 1977 in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.
She graduated from the Faculty of International Law and International Relations at Tbilisi State University in 1999 and worked as a lawyer for the International Committee of the Red Cross, Georgia, and then for Insurance Regulatory Information System Georgia, a Tbilisi office of the University of Maryland’s Center for Institutional Reform and the Informal Sector.
From October 9, 1997 until September 10, 1999, she was the Chief Specialist Centre for Foreign Policy Research and Analysis in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia. From June 1 to November 1, 2001, Tkeshelashvili was a lawyer at Lawyers" Committee of Human Rights in New York, from December 2002 until May 2003, interned at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, Netherlands. Tkeshelashvili was appointed to her first government post as Deputy Minister of Justice of Georgia on February 1, 2004.
She was then appointed Deputy Minister of Interior on September 1, 2005 and then became a Chairperson of the Tbilisi Court of Appeals from May 1, 2006 to August 1, 2007.
She served as Minister of Justice of Georgia from August 2007 to January 2008, and as Prosecutor General of Georgia from January to May 2008. On May 5, 2008 she was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, a post she held until December 5, 2008.
Her appointment coincided with Georgia’s increasingly tense relations with its northern neighbor Russia over the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and Georgia’s aspiration to join North Atlantic Treaty Organization. During her tenure in this position, she vowed to pursue active diplomacy to find a peaceful solution to all existing problems. Tkeshelashvili was replaced as Minister of Foreign Affairs by Grigol Vashadze on December 5, 2008, in a cabinet shuffle.
Later in December, she was appointed to head the National Security Council.
From 2010 to 2012, she was State Minister for Reintegration.
