The National Security Council (NSC), an eight-member crisis advisory body chaired by Georgia’s prime minister, is the latest institution to be abolished as part of Georgian Dream’s ongoing restructuring of the government and ministries. The respective bill has been submitted to the GD parliament.
The Council’s dissolution is to be completed by September 1, with the GD government planning to assume the NSC’s responsibilities. The GD administration claims the changes are in line with the country’s parliamentary governance model.
“The National Security Council’s apparatus assets, including the authority to ensure the functioning of the National Situation Room, will be transferred to the relevant agencies by the liquidation commission,” the GD government said in a press release.
The NSC was established in 2019, shortly after Georgia’s new constitution came into force, abolishing the previous council led by the President. The permanent members include the prime minister, ministers of defense, interior, foreign affairs, and finance, as well as the heads of the State Security Service and Intelligence Service, and the chief of the armed forces. Since 2020, Interior Minister Vakhtang Gomelauri had been the Secretary of the Council. Gomelauri resigned on May 28 amid a wider reshuffle within the Georgian Dream.
The National Situation Room, a crisis management facility modeled after its British analogue, opened in Georgia in 2016. Then-PM Giorgi Kvirikashvili praised the launch, saying the facility “allowed the utmost coordination between several agencies to deal with crisis situations with maximum effectiveness.”
Opposition politician and security expert Teona Akubardia criticized the move to abolish the NSC. “The National Security Council is a ‘bike’ established for national security policy planning and coordination,” she wrote on Facebook. “And [Irakli] Kobakhidze needs neither to ride it nor have this unique ‘bike,’ because he only defends Bidzina [Ivanishvili] and the regime’s security,” she added.
Earlier last month, the Georgian Dream submitted a bill to dissolve Georgia’s Intelligence Service, which currently operates as a special government body under the prime minister, and incorporate it into the State Security Service, effective July 1.
Akubardia warned that the moves “only weaken the country’s national security, and this is being done by the Kremlin with the hands of Bidzina Ivanishvili.”
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