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Georgia‘s path to European Union membership appears to be going downhill: the nation’s aspirations to lastly free itself from Russian affect, and anchor itself to the West, had appeared on the verge of being realised in December 2023, when the EU granted the Caucasus republic candidate standing.
Nevertheless, a sequence of measures adopted in current months by the federal government, led by the national-populist Georgian Dream occasion (ქართული ოცნება, GD), have brought on a setback.
The primary of those measures was the so-called “overseas brokers” transparency regulation impressed by the regulation adopted by Moscow to suppress Russian civil society. Nicknamed the “Russian regulation”, this textual content qualifies as “overseas brokers” any organisation that receives greater than 20% of its funding from overseas, and imposes heavy bureaucratic necessities and equally heavy sanctions, successfully limiting the organisation’s motion. The regulation was authorised by parliament in mid-Might regardless of protests that drove tens of hundreds of individuals into the streets of Tbilisi and different cities. In response, the EU suspended Georgia’s accession course of on 27 June.
In opposition to “LGBT propaganda”
On the identical day, Georgian deputies authorised in first studying one other Kremlin-inspired textual content, the so-called regulation in opposition to “LGBT propaganda” and for the “safety of household values and kids”. The measure bans same-sex marriage, the adoption of kids by people who find themselves not heterosexual or who don’t establish with their delivery intercourse, in addition to interventions geared toward gender reassignment.
As well as, the regulation bans all public gatherings that promote same-sex relations and identification with a special intercourse, in addition to the dissemination of data on the topic (together with movies or different cultural productions). The penalties in opposition to such “LGBT propaganda” embody fines of as much as 5,000 lari (about €1,660 euro), a major sum in a rustic the place the common wage is about 1,600 lari (about €570).
