Georgia is in tumult. In the face of huge popular opposition, and even brawling among MPs, the ruling Georgian Dream coalition government has forced its Transparency of Foreign Influence Bill through parliament.
For several days, tens of thousands of people have filled the streets of the capital, Tbilisi, in protest against a law that will require all NGOs and media outlets that receive more than 20 per cent of their funding from abroad to register as ‘agents of foreign influence’. No doubt many object to the chilling effect the law will have on public debate, with dissenters potentially demonised as, well, ‘agents of foreign influence’.
In a sense, however, it’s not the bill itself that has driven so many Georgians to courageously face down their own amassed security forces. Yes, it is an illiberal piece of legislation, modelled, in part, on Russian president Vladimir Putin’s characteristically authoritarian foreign-agent law, introduced in 2012 and revised in 2022. But it’s hardly a remarkable piece of legislation. It’s worth remembering that such laws have been enacted in the West, too. Putin himself was following a trail blazed by America, which introduced its own Foreign Agents Registration Act way back in 1938 – all as part of an attempt to combat the influence of Nazi Germany in the US. Furthermore, the EU is now also planning its own law regulating ‘foreign influence’. As indeed is the UK. Laws regulating ‘foreign influence’ are all the rage, it seems, in these geopolitically fractious times.
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