Funds of EU, US donors “used to campaign for violence” in Georgia - Parliament Speaker

Shalva Papuashvili, the Georgian Parliament Speaker, on Monday said “non-transparent” foreign funding of domestic organisations remained a “problem” in the country and claimed donations from several European-and United States-based foundations were being used to “campaign for violence”. 

The comment came following an announcement on Sunday by the domestic Shame civil movement, which said its activists would gather outside the Tbilisi City Court on Monday to demand the release of Lazare Grigoriadis - a citizen arrested and charged with throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at police officers and setting fire to a police vehicle during protests in Tbilisi against the ultimately shelved bill on transparency of foreign influence in March. 

In his comments, Papuashvili pointed to a poster released by the movement in commemoration of the protests and claimed the organisation had used funds coming from European and American donors to “campaign for violence and justify violent attacks” on citizens and the law enforcement. 

The Parliament Speaker also said the absence of a law mandating disclosure of sources of foreign funding following the withdrawal of the bill meant the information on financial support for Shame was being sourced from the organisation itself.

They have themselves admitted the American Democracy Foundation and the European Democracy Foundation are their donors. Thus, the money of European and American taxpayers is being used in Georgia to campaign for the ideology that allows one to set a person on fire if they feel it necessary”, Papuashvili said, adding “of course, the situation once again demonstrates the problem of unscrupulous foreign donors”. 

Grigoriadis was in March sentenced to preventive detention and is facing between seven and 11 years in prison if found guilty. 

Domestic non-governmental organisations have claimed the authorities had plans to “severely punish” the young protester to discourage the country’s youth from protesting the Government's actions in the future. 

The foreign transparency bill - proposed by former members of the ruling Georgian Dream party - involved registration of non-commercial legal entities and media outlets in the country as “agents of foreign influence” if they derived more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad.

It was dropped in April amid criticism from domestic NGOs, Georgia’s foreign partners and international organisations who claimed its adoption would hamper the activities of a number of organisations and media outlets in the country.