MP Matikashvili: Banning parties is the only lawful way for democracy to defend itself

“The constitutional lawsuit is well founded and full of evidence,” said MP Davit Matikashvili, chair of Parliament’s Procedural Issues Committee.

He said these parties’ activities directly breach the Constitution and target the established state order.

“The lawsuit sets out the cascade of crimes that came from the collective Nats Movement before 2012. Their activities directly contravene the country’s Constitution and pose a direct threat to the constitutional order. That is why the only correct and democratic way out of this situation is to declare these parties unconstitutional.

Militant democracy is rooted in the belief that democracy must defend itself against anti-constitutional forces, and the only correct legal path is to ban them outright. Doing so will naturally give other opposition parties more room to participate in the nation’s democratic development. As for criticism from abroad, there are double standards here too. Here, too, we see the wrong attitude, full of lies, that the Eurobureaucracy has towards the Georgian people. When particular parties are banned in Europe, they see it as democratic; in Georgia, the same thing is labelled democratic backsliding. Now their foreign-agent opposition is slipping out of their grasp,” Matikashvili said.