Thank you very much. It is a great honour to address you on this topic, which is very important for Georgia.
I would like to start by describing this law as a perfect case of the weaponization of transparency. Under the pretext of transparency and openness, it definitely aims at silencing and delegitimizing civil society, undermining independent media and simply suppressing dissent and freedom of expression and thought.
Georgia has a vibrant civil society, and this is entirely thanks to foreign, namely western, support. Georgia's partners have invested in democracy promotion since Georgia regained independence in the early nineties, and that is exactly what resulted in Georgia's being a free country, despite not being a perfect consolidated democracy.
In the official narrative justifying the law, it is being compared to similar American, British, French and other legislation. FARA, the American act, is most frequently invoked and, incidentally, was also most frequently invoked by Putin when he introduced a foreign agents law.
These acts aim at unfriendly countries and organizations that lobby on their behalf. The Georgian law aims at friends who helped out through difficult years of transition and invested in making Georgia more democratic and, in fact, more transparent. If FARA and similar acts target enemies, Georgian law targets friends, namely its western supporters, with whom we want to be institutionally linked through membership in the European Union and NATO.
According to this draft—we've heard this many times—every organization that receives more than 20% of foreign funding will have to declare itself as an agent of foreign influence. This will cover not only media and civil society organizations but also academic institutions and research centres. There is no significant local funding for this, and even if there was, I think you can imagine that the selection criteria would be very strict, a total loyalty to the ruling party. Both in its letter and its spirit, this bill bears a close resemblance to the foreign agents law passed in Russia.
This is why protesters in Tbilisi call it the “Russian law”, and we have seen how this law has destroyed civil society in Russia. Furthermore, Russia has been amending this law and making it even more draconian, expanding its scope of application from organizations to individuals. People are encouraged to spy on each other and denounce their acquaintances and neighbours as potential foreign agents or suspected foreign agents. The ease with which labels—such as “traitors” and “enemies of the people”—are applied is eerie, especially in the country that lived through the horrors of Stalinism.
The political motives that underpin both the Russian and Georgian laws are the same. These are prevention of the so-called coloured revolutions; suppression of critical voices; eradication of western influence, especially western democracy-promotion measures; and destruction of an open, pluralistic society. In the case of Georgia, there is an additional and very important factor: Georgia's European integration.
The adoption of this law will be a serious obstacle to the opening of accessions negotiations. When a similar law was adopted in Hungary, the European Court of Justice struck it down, deeming it incompatible with European law and values.
Official statements from high-level EU representatives all warn the Georgian government against the adoption of this law and call on the authorities not to jeopardize Georgia's prospects of full European integration.
Thousands of people who are standing in the streets of Tbilisi are fighting for their future. They see clearly the choice. One is turning Georgia into a Russian-style autocracy, and the other is becoming a European democracy. The majority of them have made their choice, except that it has to be defended now.
Thank you.