“I would wish that Brussels bureaucrats took the state of human rights within the European Union seriously, given that we are witnessing a day-by-day deterioration of human rights in the EU concerning freedom of expression. And it is not only we who see this, but even sharper criticism has been forthcoming from the United States,” said Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili in response to a question.

Papuashvili was asked for his opinion on the likely outcome of the open letter, in which Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze addresses Ursula von der Leyen, António Costa, and Roberta Metsola.

“Copenhagen is not an isolated exception; we have witnessed the same scenes in Berlin, Paris, and other capitals during the dispersal of peaceful demonstrations. In Copenhagen, there was a particular brutality when peaceful protesters were dispersed with batons and dogs, at a time when they posed no threat whatsoever to anyone. It also appears that the Danish police have no intention of investigating this crackdown. It is important that it be investigated and that those responsible be punished. I shall once again return to a matter I have raised before, and which concerns Denmark. In Denmark’s case, this is not an isolated incident of human rights violations. It has a very grave history of human rights abuses.

Over several decades, including the 1990s, by which time Denmark had already become a member of the European Union, the Danish authorities carried out the forced and deceptive sterilisation of half of Greenland’s female population. In addition, they conducted social experiments on Greenlandic children, who were taken away, separated from their families, and forbidden from speaking their mother tongue. The social experiment was to raise them as true Danish citizens. This entire system, which has been characterised as genocide by some Greenlandic politicians as well, has to this day not been investigated in Denmark, and no one has been punished for these crimes that have been equated with genocide. It is deeply regrettable when representatives of such a country then proceed to lecture others about standards of any kind.

We must free ourselves from the complexes that have been foisted upon the Georgian people over the years, the notion that we are a second-rate nation, not fully developed, as though Denmark, Germany, or some other country ought to be teaching us what proper living looks like, what proper Europeanness means, and how a country should rightly be built. It is we who should be teaching everyone what Europeanness and human rights truly mean.

Therefore, in the final analysis, we must cast off the inferiority complex that has been forcibly imposed upon us from outside, the idea that we are somehow pupils, with representatives of certain countries appointed as our class teachers, countries that have committed crimes equivalent to genocide against their own populations and have to this day left those matters uninvestigated. To this day, no one in Denmark has been punished for the systemic crimes that were committed in Denmark, a member state of the European Union,” Papuashvili declared.