The Daily Beat: 17 January
The Georgian delegation headed by Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili arrived in Davos, Switzerland, where he will participate in the annual World Economic Forum, attend several panel discussions, and hold bilateral meetings with private companies and representatives of the participating states. He has already met with the Executive Director of Turkish company Koç Holding – Levent Cakiroglu.
The U.S. Department of State’s Global Anti-Corruption Coordinator, Richard Nephew, visits Georgia, where he has already met with the Parliament Speaker, Shalva Papuashvili, the Head of the Georgian Anti-Corruption Bureau, Razhden Kuprashvili, the First Deputy Head of State Security Service, Aleksi Batiashvili, and the representatives of local CSOs. According to the official press releases, the country’s recent reforms and an anti-corruption agenda were discussed during the meetings in Tbilisi. Richard Nephew pledged to support Georgia’s fight against corruption.
The Central Election Commission published its 2024 Action Plan, saying it is in line with Election Administration Strategy 2023-2026. The opposition parties Girchi-More Freedom and Droa criticized the Action Plan for ignoring the issue of emigrant voting. The statement by Girchi-More Freedom and Droa noted that “the CEC has not omitted such issues as the modification of the informative-educational Internet game and the conduct of a survey on the satisfaction of the employees of the CEC office, but fails to address the issue of voting by emigrants.”
The Governance Monitoring Center (GMC), a local watchdog, issued a statement, slamming the government for breaking the law and restricting access to public information. Despite the constitutional and legal guarantees, “the freedom of and access to public information has been deteriorating yearly,” reads the GMC’s statement. In its statement, the GMC outlined the government administration, culture, and economy ministries as gross lawbreakers, accusing these agencies of deliberately failing to provide public information.
The Soviet Past Research Laboratory (SovLab), a civil society organization that studies Georgia’s Soviet past, held a press conference on the issue, saying that it has become extremely difficult and sometimes impossible for researchers to work on archival documents from the Soviet period. According to SOVLAB, the gradual restriction of access to Soviet archives by the ruling Georgian Dream has significantly hampered the scientific study of the past, contributing to the successful instrumentalization of recent history by the Russian disinformation machine.
Georgia is ranked 50th in the Henley & Partners Global Passport Index of 2024. The Index ranks all the world’s passports according to the number of destinations their holders can access without a prior visa. A person with a Georgian passport can travel visa-free to 121 countries. The index includes 199 passports and 227 destinations. In 2023, Georgia also ranked 50th in the same ranking, but with 116 visa-free countries. Five new visa-free destinations were added in 2023, including Russia and China.
