Georgian parliament speaker Shalva Papuashvili on Monday said the funds coming from several European and the US-based foundations had been used in Georgia to “back and encourage violence”, in response to a poster by a domestic Shame Movement, which reads “I threw” in support of Lazare Grigoriadis, a young protester who was sentenced to preventive detention in March for throwing stones and Molotov cocktails to police.
In his remarks, Papuashvili said the rejection and the ultimate dropping of the bill on transparency of foreign influence, which was protested by Grigoriadis and thousands others in March, the country lacked a measure to identify the foreign donor organizations funding domestic entities.
He claimed the Shame movement had itself admitted the American Democracy Foundation and the European Democracy Foundation were its donors.
“This means the money of European and American taxpayers is being used in Georgia to campaign for the ideology based on which one can set a person on fire if they feel it necessary”, Papuashvili said.
The bill proposed by the former members of the ruling Georgian Dream who still remain in the parliamentary majority, proposed the registration of non-commercial legal entities and media outlets in the country as “agents of foreign influence” if they obtained more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad.
The bill was withdrawn by the ruling party and then dropped due to large-scale domestic and foreign criticism, labeling the legal piece a “Russian law” that could silence domestic organizations and media outlets.
