Parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee Chair, Nikoloz Samkharadze, thanked Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev “for supporting Georgia and the Georgian people in the most difficult moment.”

As noted by Samkharadze, “it is no secret to anyone in the world today that the current bureaucracy of the European Union treats Georgia unfairly and they are trying to use the EU integration process as an instrument of pressure on Georgia and the Georgian people.”

“This is unfortunate. More and more people across the globe are persuaded that what is going on in Georgia right now, including this so-called polarisation, is entirely owing to our foreign partners. Hopefully, these strategies will be revisited.

EU membership remains a political goal for Georgia, and we hope that the European Union will take a fair approach to Georgia, as one of the most progressive states among candidate countries, and will recognise and respect the principle of non-interference in internal affairs,” said Nikoloz Samkharadze.

Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev earlier said, “The attitude to Georgia’s internal process in the European Commission is absolutely unacceptable.” For Aliyev, “this is a behavior of colonialists.”

“They try to look at the will of Georgian people from the prism of the colonial past. This is absolutely unacceptable. And people of Georgia know that we are with them and the government of Georgia knows and internal issues of Georgia must be resolved by the Georgian people, not by bureaucrats from Brussels,” he stated at the 7th ADA University Policy Forum titled “Facing The New World Order.”