I want to thank the subcommittee and honourable members for inviting me to this session. My name is Natasha Lindstaedt. I'm a professor of government at the University of Essex, and I'm an expert on authoritarian regimes and autocratization.
For the last several years, I've been involved in a research project that included travelling to Georgia in September 2022 and interviewing two dozen interviewees, including academics, individuals who worked at NGOs, opposition politicians and journalists.
Foreign funding is the lifeline of NGOs in Georgia, and the new draft law that designates NGOs that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad as operatives of foreign government would effectively undercut NGOs in Georgia. This attack on NGOs represents a clear assault on democracy, as NGOs give a voice to those who are unrepresented and powerless; they are vital to fostering civil society. NGOs also support political participation, the free flow of accurate information and media literacy.
Autocrats consider weakening NGOs a critical step to preventing threats to their power, and many autocratizing countries, including Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, Egypt, Ethiopia, China and Uganda, have possibly been inspired by Russia's very tough foreign agent laws.
Russia first started placing restrictions on NGOs in 2005 but implemented much more rigorous laws in 2012 following fraudulent elections that led to massive protests, and then again more stringent laws in 2014 and 2020. Under this expanded legislation, authorities in Russia have the power to label individuals, not just organizations, engaged in political activity as foreign agents. This leaves them very vulnerable to jail terms of up to five years should they fail to report their activities precisely in line with the law's requirements.
Though Georgia's law is not as stringent as the laws in Russia, this is the trajectory. These laws are incredibly arbitrary and, as mentioned, the goal is to make it near impossible for NGOs to operate, particularly those that are supporting democratic norms. By making the law arbitrary, it makes it difficult to determine what is permitted, forcing NGOs to err on the side of caution and focus solely on their own survival rather than any activities that are actually supportive of democracy.
According to some experts I interviewed in Georgia, Georgia is not democratic because it is more of a competitive authoritarian regime. The Georgian Dream party is not committed to democracy and is under considerable influence from Russia.
Opposition politicians, NGOs and academics claim that they were already being surveilled by the Georgian government, and this is inspired by the Soviet Russian-style tactic of kompromat, to find compromising information on them that would then be used against them.
Russia does not accept the boundaries of the post-Soviet world, and Georgians remain very concerned about facing another invasion, or that their de facto leader, Bidzina Ivanishvili, is either dependent on the Russians or has coinciding interests. Russia, through its vast propaganda machine, claims that the greatest existential threat facing countries in the post-Soviet sphere is western values embodied by, for example, non-traditional forms of marriage.
NGOs work to counter these disinformation campaigns. Closing civic spaces and infringing upon the work of NGOs is a global trend. It's a frightening one, and more and more people are facing serious restrictions.
Though authoritarian regimes often do not ban NGOs outright, they want to keep a close eye on them, and they mimic democracies in many different ways, one of which is to create these fake NGOs known as GONGOs, which are merely extensions of the state. Georgia has done this as well. The Georgian government has embarked on other tactics to weaken NGOs, whether they be engaging in personal attacks on people who work in NGOs, starting to show the salaries of people who work in the NGO sector, publicly shaming people who work in NGOs, claiming that protests are organized by NGOs to destabilize the country, claiming that people who work for NGOs don't care about democracy or the Georgian people, expelling people working in NGOs or supporting far-right groups that might directly attack NGOs.
The spate of attacks on NGOs is a critical tool used by authoritarian regimes to expand their power, and though these laws are passed in defence of sovereignty, they represent a clear break from democracy. As Russian influence continues to grow in the region and around the world, these types of copycat laws are more likely to become the norm.
Thank you.