“Georgia is not attacking anyone, but simply began speaking out somewhat earlier than others about the shortcomings it had observed within international organisations, because Georgia had experienced those shortcomings firsthand,” Georgia’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Maka Botchorishvili, stated on the television programme Imedi LIVE.

“We said that the Venice Commission had become a political instrument, issuing political judgements rather than legal recommendations on legislation. We experienced this ourselves, an expert assessment of a law escalated into a verdict that this government is unfit and must be replaced,” Botchorishvili noted.

In the Minister’s assessment, an identical problem is plainly visible in the workings of the Council of Europe and OSCE institutions.

“We have seen how events unfolded within the Council of Europe and its Parliamentary Assembly, and how Council of Europe institutions are being used. At the OSCE Ministerial Council in Vienna in December, I stated emphatically that institutions were being weaponised as political instruments to interfere in the domestic affairs of sovereign states,” the head of the foreign ministry declared.

She further stated that international organisations have been so thoroughly exploited for interference in domestic affairs that all boundaries have been effectively erased.

“What we have always valued about the European Union, what distinguished it from the Soviet Union, was precisely that it was a union of sovereign states, meaning that each state retained its sovereign right to determine its own domestic affairs. And yet what do we see today? Globalisation has been interpreted in such a way that certain bodies have been created, which simply decide what your country must do.

International organisations have been so thoroughly exploited for the purpose of interfering in domestic affairs that all boundaries have been lost. Every instrument has been deployed to impose upon you whatever rules someone happened to conceive in some office somewhere,” Botchorishvili stated.

The Minister also maintained that so-called political dialogue is frequently nothing more than an artificial process engineered through the interference of international organisations.

“Political dialogue, some contrived process set in motion, the Charles Michel agreement and agreements that had nothing whatsoever to do with the interests of any political force. Nobody was genuinely concerned with how the Prosecutor General was to be appointed at a time when we supposedly had a crisis in the country, or how to bring elected members of parliament back into parliament. This is the level to which the role of international organisations has sunk, fabricating such artificial processes, ostensibly to restore calm,” the Minister remarked.