Georgians Lean West—and Into the Water Cannons

A video of a woman defiantly waving a blue and gold EU flag in the face of police water cannons went viral on Tuesday as thousands of people took to the streets of the capital of Tbilisi, Georgia, to protest a proposed new law that critics say closely models Russian legislation used to crack down on independent media and civil society.

The country’s Parliament green lit a new law on Tuesday that would require all nonprofit and media organizations that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad to register as so-called foreign agents. Civil society organizations and Western governments have condemned the law over concerns that it could stifle freedom of expression in a country once considered to be a rare beacon of democracy in Russia’s backyard.

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili has vowed to veto the legislation, describing it as a law that “nobody needs and that has been initiated out of nowhere, if not from some directives from Moscow.”

Similarities to Russia’s law on foreign agents have caused significant disquiet in a country that was invaded by Russia in 2008 and where public support for EU and NATO membership remains high at 75 percent and 69 percent, respectively, according to recent polling. While support for Western integration among the Georgian people remains high, recent political crises and the Georgian Dream-led government’s antagonistic relationship with Ukraine since the Russian invasion has sparked concerns of a tilt toward Moscow.

The Russian law, passed in 2012, forced a significant number of civil society groups to shut down, according to Human Rights Watch, and in 2021 was used as a pretext to close Russia’s most celebrated human rights watchdog Memorial, a laureate of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

“The whole society united [in] really pushing back this law because we know what happened in Russia,” said Eka Gigauri, executive director of Transparency International Georgia. “There is war in Ukraine, but we also have war with Russian type of rule here,” she said.

Georgia’s democratic gains have been gradually hollowed out in recent years amid concerns that checks and balances on government power have been eroded and that powerful institutions of the state are increasingly beholden to billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, who founded the ruling Georgian Dream political party. While Ivanishvili holds no formal position in government, he is widely regarded as wielding significant influence from behind the scenes. But even by recent standards, adoption of the so-called foreign agents law would represent a dramatic step backward, giving the authorities broad powers to harass and potentially silence the country’s vibrant civil society.

The proposed law also comes as former President Mikheil Saakashvili remains in prison and is reported to be in poor health. The polarizing former leader, who pursued an ambitious program of reforms following the 2003 Rose Revolution, is serving a six-year prison sentence after being convicted of abuse of power stemming from his time in office.

Last week, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued a joint statement urging the government to consider releasing Saakashvili on medical grounds, warning that the denial of adequate health care placed him at “grave risk of death, permanent disability, or other irreversible damage to his health.”

Several months before the law was proposed by People’s Power, a small anti-Western party in the Georgian Parliament, there was a significant uptick in stories attacking the work of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in media considered to be supportive of the Georgian government, accusing the groups of receiving large sums of money from Western governments and working to undermine Georgian interests, said Gigauri, who has been personally singled out by some of the reports.

“After they thought that they had already discredited our image, then they tried to push this legislation,” said Nino Dolidze, executive director of the International Society of Fair Elections and Democracy, a Georgian election monitoring organization. “We can assume that of course they [the government] would like to adopt this legislation to become law, but they are looking at how society reacts,” Dolidze said.

In light of the public outcry, the Georgian government on Wednesday sent the proposal for review to the Venice Commission, an independent advisory body to the Council of Europe that provides legal advice to member states. The bill requires two further hearings by Parliament before it can become law.

“The final form of the law will depend on the opinion of the Venice Commission and the consideration of the law in the second reading in the Parliament,” Georgian Dream Chairman Irakli Kobakhidze said on Wednesday. “There was a campaign based on lies that it was a Russian law, which is a lie. It was said that this document distances us from the [European Union] candidate status, which is also a lie,” he added.

The Georgian Dream has sought to justify the law, comparing it to the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires lobbyists acting on behalf of foreign governments to publicly disclose their ties. U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, described comparisons between the U.S. and Georgian laws as “absolutely false.” Shaheen, who visited Georgia in February, described the proposed Georgian legislation as “very similar, almost exactly, to the law that Russia passed when they started cracking down on the media and NGOs in Russia, and that’s exactly what Georgia is planning to do.”

If passed, the foreign agents law would apply to a broad spectrum of the country’s civil society organizations and independent media, many of which are dependent on foreign grants for their survival. An analysis by the U.S.-based International Center for Not-for-Profit Law and the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law notes that, if passed, the law would impose burdensome reporting requirements on organizations that receive foreign funding and introduce steep penalties for those who fail to comply. A similar assessment by Transparency International Georgia noted that the term “foreign agents” risks stigmatizing civil society. “It creates the impression that the corresponding organizations are either ‘spies,’ ‘traitors’ or ‘under foreign control,’” the assessment said.

The timing behind the proposed bill remains unclear. One possible explanation is that the Georgian Dream is seeking to consolidate power and stifle dissent, Dolidze said. The move comes ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled to take place next year under a new system of proportional representation, which is expected to make it more challenging for an individual party to secure a majority in Parliament. Another theory is that the Georgian Dream is quietly trying to sabotage the country’s prospects of joining the European Union, Gigauri said. In 2021, Hungary was forced to quash a similar foreign agents law after the European Court of Justice found the legislation to be discriminatory and imposed “unjustified restrictions” on affected organizations.

Last year, the EU granted candidate status to Ukraine and Moldova but deferred extending the designation to Georgia, noting that further reforms on rule of law, the independence of the media, and the independence of the judiciary were required.

On Tuesday, EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell described the draft law as “incompatible with EU values and standards.”

In a press briefing last week, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price underscored American concerns about the law’s impact on freedom of speech and democracy in Georgia. “Anyone voting for this draft legislation would be responsible for potentially jeopardizing Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic future,” he said.

The country’s civil society leaders view the law in similar terms.

“It’s about this country and the quality of democracy of this country,” Gigauri said. “It’s also about where the country is going. And it definitely does not go in the right direction,” she said.

Update, March 9, 2023: On Thursday, the Georgian Dream announced that it was unconditionally scrapping the bill after two nights of violent street protests in Tbilisi. The party acknowledged public outrage over the proposed law and blamed a “machine of lies” for misleading the public about the nature of the legislation.

Correction, March 9, 2023: A previous version misspelled Eka Gigauri’s name.