Calls to strengthen unrestricted surveillance laws

Human rights and watchdog groups have called on the Georgian Government to create a law to limit the Government’s capabilities to carry out illegal surveillance.

Earlier today, Georgia’s Public Defender Ucha Nanuashvili said the Government currently had the ability to conduct illegal surveillance on Georgian citizens but had no information whether the Government used it in practice. 

"The issue needs to be regulated, considering the facts of secret recordings undertaken by the previous Government. But I have no information if the current Government carries out and keeps illegal recordings,” Nanuashvili said. 

Meanwhile, a dozen Georgian civil society organizations have teamed up in a campaign, called This Affects You, aimed to establish a mechanism that would rein in the Government’s capabilities to carry out illegal surveillance. 

The collective group believed the present laws could not protect Georgian citizens from being illegally spied on, and called the Government to create rules to ensure proper judicial oversight over Government surveillance practices. 

In particularly they called for action to: 

• Set up an efficient system, which provided higher standards of investigations but banned methods of illegally obtaining recordings by law enforcement agencies.   
• Allow surveillance and eavesdropping to be carried out only in specific cases, including serious crimes. 
• Set limits for private recordings and eavesdropping, as well as setting rules to keep and destroy the recordings.
• Introduce mechanisms to oversee the surveillance.  

The issue of illegal surveillance has become subject of intense discussion in Georgia following the revelation thousands of secret video recordings were kept by the former government of Georgia. 

The current Government has pledged to establish strong mechanisms in legislative and executive level to prevent illegal surveillance. But human rights and watchdog groups said despite these promises, law enforcement agencies still had unlimited access to data from communication service operators. 

"The ruling coalition, which came into power after the 2012 Parliamentary elections, did not carry out any systemic change in this regard,” read the statement released on behalf of the campaign group. 

The group members believed a draft law on surveillance and eavesdropping, initiated by Parliament last year, aimed to introduce standards that would protect people from being illegally spied on.

The draft law has not yet been accepted by Parliament. 

Meanwhile, the Minister of Internal Affairs Aleksandre Tchikaidze stressed the Government was going through the consultation process on introducing high standard regulations. 

He denied accusations that law enforcement agencies would still maintain the so-called 'black box' devices in the server infrastructure of major telecommunication companies, which give security agencies direct access to simultaneously monitoring thousands of mobile phone numbers. 

"Believe me [we are] not conducting any kind of illegal surveillance,” Tchikaidze said.

"I hope every Georgian citizen believes this in their everyday life. When there was a real basis for doubt, a percentage of people tried to keep silence and now these people are talking too much,” Tchikaidze said. 

It was revealed the Interior Ministry housed about 635 CDs containing more than 750 hours of secret video recordings. They were filmed over a number of years, from 2007 to 2012.