by Gigi Kobakhidze, from Strasbourg
The 2025 PACE winter session is held in Strasbourg from January 27 to January 31, and Georgia has been one of the central topics of discussion. All the key players from Georgia are in town to joust for their agendas. The official delegation is composed of GD MPs and one representative from People’s Power, a far-right spinoff of GD, which ironically takes the position of the opposition. The leaders from the four opposition forces that contested the October 26 elections and civil society figures have also roamed the halls of the Palais des Nations, as the Strasbourg home of PACE is known.
And while the protests in Tbilisi enter their 60th day, the focus here is on the contested results of the October 26 elections but more so on repression, human rights abuses, and political persecution that followed.
Lacking legitimacy at home, the Georgian Dream members sitting in the country’s rump parliament now have to grapple with the same issue internationally. For the first time since Georgia joined the Council of Europe (CoE) in 1999, the credentials of its delegation to the organization’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) were challenged on January 27, the opening day of the winter session.
“Georgian parliament is a one-party parliament with only Georgian Dream in it. Ivanishvili regime is demolishing democratic order in Georgia,” declared Boriana Åberg, a Swedish MP and member of the European People’s Party (EPP) group in PACE, presenting the challenge “on substantive grounds” according to the rules of procedure. The challenge got sufficient backing from PACE members and was handed over to the PACE Monitoring Committee for drafting the resolution.
The next day, January 28, the Committee released the draft resolution, which proposes to recognize Georgian MP credentials conditionally, with several important strings attached.
If the draft resolution passes, the Georgian MP delegation will be admitted and can participate in the committees but not vote in the plenary. The Assembly will reconsider granting full credentials at its next session in April. In the meantime, the GD will have to fulfill crucial conditions.
The document “insists” that the Georgian authorities announce new elections until the April session, resume EU integration, end police brutality, strengthen cooperation with the CoE, and repeal controversial legislation, including the Foreign Agents law. It also calls for releasing “all political prisoners” and continuing to engage fully with the Assembly’s monitoring process. Two of these – new elections and the release of political prisoners – are also the demands of the protesters in Georgia.
Opposition forces, who earlier this month appealed to the PACE President and the leaders of the Assembly’s political groups to withhold GD MP credentials, have welcomed the draft.
Opposition optimistic
“All our suggestions have been taken into account,” Giorgi Vashadze of Unity-UNM told Civil.ge, dismissing voices that the proposed decision could be in some way advantageous for the GD. He said the “Russian clan” with some residual influence in the CoE had tried to “help the GD,” but to no avail. Vashadze welcomed the draft the Monitoring Committee put forward, especially since it sets a specific deadline of April for GD to satisfy the conditions.
Salome Samadashvili of the opposition coalition Strong Georgia claimed that “all major, critical groups” within PACE agree that the GD contradicts the will of the Georgian people. She says the only differences of opinion were about the ways to put pressure on the regime.
“An unprecedented framework has been created,” argues Giorgi Kandelaki, a former MP who attends the PACE session on behalf of a think tank, the Soviet Past Research Laboratory. He stressed the decision would complement the pressure from protesting citizens in Georgia and the country’s other international partners, nudging the government to announce new elections and release political prisoners.
Amendments and the coming showdown
The committee resolution is now open to written comments, and some amendments to the document are already on the table. GD MPs are pushing to dilute or drop the conditions altogether. Yet, this is a double-edged sword. Some delegates would like to see GD MP credentials refused outright. Late on January 28, eleven PACE members from the EC/DA, SOC, and ALDE groups tabled an amendment stating that the Assembly should not ratify the Georgian delegation’s credentials.
The crucial debate, to be held on the January 29 plenary, would be decisive in determining whether and how the initial draft would be modified.
“I don’t think anyone would make a decision that favors GD,” Zurab Girchi Japaridze of the Coalition for Change told us. He said that except for radical left and right groups, there is a consensus that PACE should react to the events in Georgia.
One of the co-authors of the amendment calling for an outright refusal of the credentials is a Ukrainian MP, Oleksiy Goncharenko. Before the amendments were published, he told us, “The most important thing [in the document] is the call for immediate new elections,” which “signals that Europe does not recognize the [October] elections.” He added, “This is not the delegation of Georgian people but of Georgian regime.”
No matter the final decision, the challenge to the Georgian delegations’ credentials casts a grim light on the state of Georgian democracy. The precedents are disturbing—a year ago, PACE decided not to ratify the credentials of the Azerbaijani delegation on similar substantive issues. Ucha Nanuashvili, Georgia’s Public Defender from 2012 to 2017, told us, “Georgia is [now] seen in the group of countries with similar problems, for example, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Russia.”
Also Read: