Foreign Affairs Committee Chair urges EU to judge foreign agents law legally and accept protests ‘were not peaceful’
“A process aimed at tarnishing Georgia’s international standing through statements anchored in fictitious, fabricated perceptions has been pursued by the EU for a considerable period,” MP Nikoloz Samkharadze, Chairman of the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, stated.
Samkharadze was commenting on remarks made by the Deputy Permanent Representative of the European Union to the UN, who urged Georgia to “repeal or substantially revise recent legislation” while condemning alleged “arbitrary arrests and increasing repression targeting opposition leaders, independent journalists, media workers, and civil society actors.”
“If anyone has legitimate legal objections regarding the legislation cited in that gentleman’s address, we stand entirely ready to sit down and examine every single clause written into these laws from a legal standpoint. The Prime Minister extended this precise invitation as far back as the summer of 2024; yet two years have passed, and that initiative has yielded no response whatsoever. This was no one-off gesture; we have reiterated our readiness to sit down and discuss the law on multiple occasions since.
Everyone knows well, including within the European Union, that the demonstrations of November 2024 were by no means peaceful. Extensive video evidence and recordings confirm this. Despite having all this material at their disposal, the EU stubbornly maintains that these protests were entirely peaceful.
When anyone, be it a representative of the European Union, China, the United States, or Australia, insists that black is white, it is naturally unacceptable to us and to the Georgian public.
Therefore, for their own benefit as well as for the future of EU–Georgia relations, it would be far better if they reconsidered this stance: on the one hand, agreeing to sit down with us to dissect the law on legal grounds, and on the other, acknowledging the undeniable fact that the protests were not peaceful,” Nikoloz Samkharadze stated.