Parliament Speaker claims NGOs “funded from EU budget” “engaged in campaign of threatening, insulting” officials

Georgian Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili on Thursday claimed domestic non-governmental organisations “funded from the European Union budget” were “engaged in a campaign of loathing, threatening and insulting senior political officials” of the Government.

Papuashvili said it was “regrettable that the EU is not responding to this development”, created on the backdrop of adoption of the controversial law on transparency of foreign influence.

He further urged the bloc’s bodies to “express their position” and added “turning a deaf ear to the violence and terror”, and to appeals of the ruling team, was “unacceptable”.

Papuashvili also called on the EU to study cases where organisations financed from its budget and their employees were “engaged in [making] threats, [engaging in] terror [and] intimidation”.

These are cases which, unfortunately, no representative of the European Union has responded to. Not a single non-governmental organisation has condemned this violence, terror, threats, hate campaign, which is being carried out by some non-governmental organisations and radical opposition in Georgia”, he said.

The law on transparency of foreign influence requires registration of non-commercial legal entities and media outlets in the country as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power” if they derive more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad.

It was supported by 84 MPs in the 150-member Parliament, with 30 voting against, and requires the groups “considered to be an organisation pursuing the interests of a foreign power” to be registered in the public registry with the status and publicise their received funding.