…on what to expect when you’re expecting
Admissibility hearings on the Foreign Agents Law at the Constitutional Court ended minutes after summer ended in Georgia. The court’s decision on whether to accept four appeals against the controversial law and, more importantly, whether to suspend its application pending a final ruling, is expected any day now. Some are hoping for a “historic” (meaning favorable) – decision. But in a judicial body dominated by government loyalists, those hopes are based on nothing more than our high school overdose of literary works about the possibility of positive human transformations. And while the jury is out, let us recount Georgia’s not-so-smooth transition from the summer of denial to what may become the most tense autumn the country has seen in years.
Here is Nini and the Dispatch newsletter to tell about the weeks full of trials, (t)errors, and what they might mean for the coming months.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
September is a month of new beginnings, but not in Georgia, where September is followed by… October. October is the month of crucial elections likely to determine the country’s choice between democracy and authoritarianism – much touted by the ruling party. After October comes November, and the weeks after elections have rarely been peaceful. And after November… We don’t know if there is life after November.
October is our vanishing point, the farthest our plans, hopes, and dreams can go now. Start your dream project? See what happens in October first. Get married? Have a child? Buy a new house? Just wait until the end of October. Change your career (so tempting)? Go live in the village? Apply for that scholarship? Plan a trip? Only after October – do not waste money if you needn’t buy a return ticket. Buy a new car? You might need that money for emergencies. Go on a diet? You’ll need energy when the hell gets loose.
The Four Horsemen of Constitutional Apocalypse
But before September and October, there was August. August is considered a dead month, but the ruling Georgian Dream party still found things that were alive enough to kill, like the remnants of Georgian democracy or the party’s good relations with the church. Thus, in mid-month, GD launched its campaign with four promises for which it asks the voters to give it a “constitutional majority”: banning most of the opposition, completing the crackdown on LGBTQ rights, restoring territorial integrity by some vague means, and declaring Orthodox Christianity the state religion.
We’ll see in October if the first two promises worked. We may not live to see what the third promise is really about. But the last one—kept secret at first—backfired before the party even announced it: immediately after the word went out that it was about the state religion, the Georgian Orthodox Church (GOC) made it clear that it wasn’t giving up its independence and was happy with the preferential treatment it already enjoyed. Thank you very much, and God bless you!
GD leaders, more afraid of the Church than of God, have been scrambling for excuses ever since and ended up pledging something like rewriting what is already in the Constitution about the role of GOC, but with different, fancier wording (brace yourself, ChatGPT).
Was it a mere attempt to woo Orthodox voters, or did the party aim to bring the Church under its sway? Either way, it was a bad miscalculation, and if they miscalculated with the Church, they could have miscalculated with anyone else? (please?!).
Der Prozess
The Constitutional Court hearings showed that the Foreign Agents Law may have also been rushed through before the authorities had any idea how to enforce it. It would take a good novelist with a penchant for the absurd to describe all the courtroom saw over the past three days of hearings, but although we share the misery of Kafka or Dostoyevsky, we don’t have their talents. So, let’s settle for a brief summary.
The plaintiffs (the President, media organizations, NGOs, and opposition parties) sent their best lawyers and arguments to convince the judges of the destructiveness of the law and its incompatibility with the basic norms of the Georgian Constitution. The parliament – the defendant – sent three young lawyers, who were there as part of their duties as civil servants but didn’t seem like they hated what they were doing. Rather, they looked like they were trying to recreate the cold and cool courtroom scenes from American movies they watched during their law school years. If for the plaintiffs it was a matter of survival, for the defendants, it seemed to be just a game to be played, which isn’t surprising when you consider that Georgian Dream’s legislature is led by former law school nerds who got too carried away playing devil’s advocate (“I’m in the dark here!!!”).
And there were representatives of the Ministry of Justice being somewhat inconsistent about what to expect after the September 2 deadline for registering as foreign agents passes. They said it would take two to three months for those who refuse to register to be identified and fined and to enforce those fines. They also assured that the most sensitive information – one of the main concerns of the law’s critics – would either not be requested from organizations or would not be made public.
However, critics found it difficult to trust the officials’ words when the already abusive law leaves plenty of room for further abuse. And while some were pleased that “2-3 months” meant that the authorities would not be able to paralyze NGO work until after the October 26 elections, others – familiar with the law – say the law-related repressions can start as early as September 3. While organizations have one month to pay a fine, that could still leave enough time for the authorities to start enforcement before the elections, including incapacitating organizations by freezing their assets.
Shaming Shame
Confusion about what to expect before and after the elections has led to controversies among Georgian CSOs. According to the deputy justice minister, over 200 organizations have already applied for registration. While as many as 30,000 non-commercial organizations are formally active in Georgia, it is unclear what proportion are foreign-funded and thus fall under the parliament-defined category of “foreign agents.”
Many have vowed not to register on what they see as a humiliating list. Some of them hope to make it to the elections with fines or mutual solidarity, but others feel they don’t have those options: at least two initiatives – Animal Project (animal rights) and Revolution of Kindness (charity) – have announced that they will rather shut down than risk fines, hoping to continue activism in another form. Eco Center, an environmental group based in Rustavi, said it had no choice but to register but would close down if the law remained in force after the elections.
But there was one case where people were less sympathetic, and that was when the Shame Movement – an activist group often singled out by the government as the epitome of a “foreign agent” – learned the hard way that shaming is not always the best way to lead activism.
In a surprise announcement on August 30, the movement said in a social media video that they had made a hard decision to register, citing heavy fines they couldn’t afford. The group immediately came under heavy fire from former comrades who saw them as strikebreakers and claimed they expected more courage from them. Critics were particularly angered by the group’s excuses, in which they tried to downplay the stigmatizing effect of the registry, undermining one of the key arguments CSOs (and its defenders) have advanced in the Constitutional Court and the court of public opinion.
After the backlash, Shame Movement admitted a mistake, deleted the clip, said it would no longer register, and announced that its executive director had resigned over the controversy. But for many, the group’s reputation is ruined forever. Of course, conspiracy theorists emerged to allege that the group was deliberately doing the ruling party’s bidding.
We certainly don’t know what happened, but we may only begin to see that the destruction wrought by the repressive law has many more dramatic layers than we first thought.
