FLY. The streets in Tbilisi flare up again against the revival in Parliament of the law on ‘foreign influences’, also known as the law on foreign agents, wanted by the ruling Georgian Dream party, which is accused by its opponents of wanting to bring the country closer to Russia by passing a regulation modeled on that in force in Moscow which has allowed many critical voices to be silenced. Several thousand demonstrators gathered on Sunday evening, on the initiative of around a hundred human rights groups and opposition parties, to protest in front of Parliament, where the debate on the second of the three readings of the law began today.
There were moments of tension when some of the protesters tried to break through the police cordon to approach the building. The anti-riot forces intervened by carrying out some arrests, including that of the former Minister of State for European and North Atlantic Integration, Aleksi Petriashvili. Along with the national flags, many demonstrators waved those of the European Union, to show support for the process of integration into the EU, after Georgia was recognized as a candidate country last December.
The same scenes were seen in the streets of Tbilisi a year ago, when the ruling party agreed to withdraw the law under pressure from protesters. Today the spokesperson of the External Action Service, Peter Stano, made the voice of the Union clearly heard in support of the opponents and warned that the legislative initiative risks blocking the path towards integration. «The adoption of this law – stated Stano – distances Georgia from the EU and is not in line with our values. The EU does everything possible to make the consequences of this law clear.”
The US and Great Britain have also expressed their opposition to the legislation. The proposed text – already dubbed the ‘Russian law’ by opponents – would require non-governmental organizations and media outlets that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register administratively as “organizations defending foreign interests.”
Levan Khabeishvili, the leader of the United National Movement, the largest opposition party, accused the government of wanting to use it to “declare non-governmental organizations and the media it does not control as enemies of the people and the state.” The government majority instead states that the legislation is inspired, rather than by the Russian one, by that in force in the United States since the 1930s, and has the sole purpose of guaranteeing transparency on foreign influences.
“The bill does not provide for any sanctions against these organizations,” assured the rapporteur, Mamuka Mdinaradze. However, the clash of recent days seems to take on a value that goes beyond the fate of the law, between those who want to try to recover relations with Russia – with which Georgia fought a short war in 2008 – and those who are instead pushing for a specific choice western. Two poles represented by the governing party on the one hand and, on the other, by the Franco-Georgian president Salome Zourabishvili, former French ambassador to Georgia, who has announced her veto of the legislation if it were approved by Parliament.