Demonstration in Georgia against the adoption of the law on foreign agents

Georgian opponents will begin consultations with public groups to create a “Public Resistance Movement” and prevent Georgian authorities from approving the Foreign Agents Bill.“We will not abandon the European choice. It’s time to unite,” Mamuka Khazaradze, leader of the opposition Lelo party, said on March 3.Earlier, in a spontaneous protest outside the Georgian Parliament building, 36 protesters were arrested. As of this writing, some of the detainees have already been released, but at the same time, 29 people remain in administrative detention. According to the Georgian Interior Ministry, all of the people were detained on the basis of articles involving petty hooliganism and resisting the police.Despite the protest of journalists in the parliament building and the action in front of the building, parliamentary committees have still started considering two bills on foreign agents, initiated by a group of anti-Western MPs with the support of the ruling party Georgian Dream.Opponents of the authorities claim that the two bills are, in fact, an analogy with the Russian law on foreign agents, after the introduction of which independent NGOs and journalists stopped working in the Russian Federation.Meanwhile, the ruling Georgian Dream party denies the charges and says the bill is only intended to provide “transparency” in the funding of NGOs and the media and is not intended to persecute or shut them down.On March 2, the US State Department warned Tbilisi for the third time in two weeks of the consequences of the adoption of a law regulating the media and NGOs. At a press briefing in Washington, State Department spokesman Ned Price reiterated that the bill being considered by Georgia lawmakers would “stigmatize and silence independent citizens” and that the United States United were “deeply concerned about the potential impact of this law on free speech and democracy” and future European integration. Georgia.“Our position is simple, we have stated it publicly, as well as in private conversations. Anyone who supports the bill will be responsible for threatening Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic future,” Price said.At the same time, the representative of the US Department of Foreign Policy pointed to the unsubstantiated claims that one of the Georgian bills is an analogue of the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).“There is a lot of propaganda around this law…Our FARA law requires registration of foreign government officials and does not apply to the activities and funding of non-governmental organizations…The scope of FARA is very limited, it only applies to agents of foreign governments. They are completely different things,” Ned Price said.The director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, also expressed concern about the bills currently being examined in the Georgian parliament. As she tweeted, both bills pose a serious threat to Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic future and will potentially limit citizens’ ability to achieve their economic, social and other goals. The USAID chief urged the Georgian parliament not to pass any of the bills.Kakha Gogolashvili, a political scientist at the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, believes that the initial aim of the proposed bills was to “neutralize” a number of non-governmental organizations that regularly criticize the Georgian authorities. According to the expert, there is a risk that media or NGOs that are reprehensible to the authorities and registered in the register of foreign agents, in the absence of an independent tribunal, will not be able to prove, if necessary, that ‘they are not a threat to the security of the country.According to Gogolashvili, if the adoption of such a law, as its authors say, is necessary for security reasons, then it should be “more precise”. The expert suggests that, like European laws, it should contain a list of countries whose funding poses a threat to the security of Georgia, for example, these may be countries that do not recognize the territorial integrity of Georgia, like Russia. Or, as in US FARA, it would have to be labeled as lobbyists trying to promote state interests contrary to Georgia’s interests.“If Parliament does pass any of the proposed bills, it will put an end to Western integration in the country, as both options potentially pose a threat to freedom of expression. Georgian Dream, which received a mandate from the citizens of the country to bring Georgia into the EU, as defined in the country’s Constitution, will bear full responsibility for the consequences,” the expert concluded.It should be noted that according to the results of the latest survey conducted in Georgia in December by an American non-governmental organization – the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the number of supporters of Georgia’s EU membership was 81%, and the number of supporters of the country’s integration into NATO – 73%. At the same time, only 30% of respondents believe that the Georgian government is doing everything possible to ensure that the country joins the European Union. At the same time, 56% said the authorities were not doing enough or nothing at all to achieve this goal.