Mr. Nikoloz Samkharadze:

I thank the Deputies for their questions. I will take them in the order they were asked. The law is entitled the law on transparency of foreign funding; it is not the foreign agents law. Unfortunately, it was branded or labelled by our opponents as a foreign agents law and a so-called Russian law. The first article of the draft Bill stated that the law would not restrict the activity of any non-profit organisation in Georgia. The reason we needed the initiation of this draft was because there are several hundred non-profit organisations operating in Georgia.

Most of them, I would say 95%, are doing good for their country. They are supporting vulnerable people and they are supporting developments in different areas. In the area of the environment, for example, they are very prominent and they are supporting the State in carrying out important reforms. However, there is the other 5% of the non-profit organisations that have dubious sources of funding. They sometimes come out and protest against Georgia's energy independence, for example. They also take some subversive actions in certain areas of Georgia.

The aim of the law was to provide transparency around foreign funding for Georgian NGOs. According to Georgian legislation, it is voluntary for Georgian non-profits to publish information about foreign funding. It is not compulsory and it is not mandatory. The aim of this draft was to create a register in the public registry where the non-profits who get their funding from foreign sources would register how much income they got in a calendar year. That was the only principle of this law, which was for transparency; it did not restrict the activity of any non-profit organisation. That is why we had to face the reality when there was lots of fake news and speculation about the draft law, comparing it to Russian or Hungarian laws. However, if you really read the content of the draft, there was nothing that would have been similar to Russian or Hungarian law, because in Russia they can use the law to close down a non-profit organisation, initiate criminal proceedings against it or even to label individual people or the employees of an organisation as being foreign agents. This was not the case in the Georgian draft legislation.

Unfortunately, people protested. This was genuine protest by the people. The protest was not against the law itself, but against the fact that this law could have impeded Georgia's European integration. The statements that were made by our European partners clearly pointed to the fact that this was not a good time for the law to be adopted. Then, there was an attack on policemen, Molotov cocktails thrown at them, and there was an attempt to storm the Parliament. Things were getting nasty. We decided to reject the Bill because, on the one hand, it might have caused unrest and destabilisation in Georgia. That is the last thing we need right now. On the other hand, we basically thought that the timing was for good in the context of discussing the law. The law has been rejected. It is not on the table anymore. Ironically, when we rejected the law, the European People's Party and European Parliament initiated the same type of law. We are hearing that the same type of law is now being debated in the UK Parliament and also in the Canadian Parliament. All three of them will be dealing with having greater transparency for the funding of non-profit organisations from abroad.

In Georgia's case, given the complexity of our security situation, we need to be aware of which non-profit organisations are receiving funds from non-friendly countries. This is also a security challenge for us. To give one example, Georgia is short of energy generation and we need to build new hydropower plants. Two years ago, a decision was made by the Government of Georgia to build a big hydropower plant in the western part of Georgia. Then, there were massive protests against the power plant and against the construction of the hydropower plant. This led to the stopping of the project. It turned out that the non-profit organisations that started this mass protest against the hydropower plants were funded from Russia. This is not just an isolated case; there are other cases. That is why we need a greater transparency around the work of non-profits and the funding of non-profits. This is even more the case because the non-profit organisations are now more and more involved in decision-making and policy-making, because all of them sit on committee sessions.

In Georgia, non-profit organisations can attend committee sessions. Their representatives can even speak during those sessions. They can propose their ideas during the sessions. The same goes for the governmental working groups when the Government is developing a strategy or action plan. Non-profit organisations are always part of the process. We want to have a transparent decision-making process. In Georgia, all declarations of assets are public. Someone can go online and see how many cars or apartments I own. Even my wife's income is transparent. The same goes for all public servants who work for the Government. If we are all transparent, the funding of the non-profit organisations, which are part of the decision-making process, should also be transparent. That was the idea behind the law. However, since we basically failed to bring this idea forward or to tell Georgian society in detail about the content of the law, and since it created some unrest and disturbances, we decided to reject the Bill. It is off the table for now. We will wait to see the outcome of the UK's experience, the Canadian experience and the experience of the European Parliament. Maybe the next convocation of Parliament will discuss it. We will find other ways to ensure transparency of non-profits.

On the second question, I do not really know what to say because this is the first time I am hearing about the Hungarian law. There are no plans or ideas to have a law on this issue. On the contrary, we have adopted the law on equality and the eradication of discrimination, which states very clearly that people cannot be discriminated against based on their sexual orientation. This law has been in force for the past five years.

We have just adopted the action plan on the human rights strategy for the next ten years, and it was last week that we voted this strategy in. In the action plan, we have included certain actions that are directed at improving or upholding the rights of LGBT people. This is the first time I have heard about a law that somebody wants to initiate. I assure the committee that there will be no law in the Georgian Parliament on this topic.

On the question regarding the difficulties on the road towards the European Union, the Deputy mentioned deoligarchisation, which is a word that we just learned several months ago. As the committee knows, this has been a recommendation not only to Georgia but also to Ukraine and Moldova. The first draft of the law was sent to the Venice Commission. We were waiting for the Venice Commission's recommendations, which arrived just last week. What we will do now is have committee hearings and plenary hearings - the second and third hearings. We will include the Venice Commission's recommendations in the text of the draft law, and we will adopt the law accordingly. Deoligarchisation, which is one of the recommendations, will be fulfilled, hopefully by the end of April, and this will then be off the table. There are basically no other major obstacles to fulfilling the other recommendations. They are more or less clear to us and, as I said, by the beginning of June we will be done with all of them.

The Deputy is right in that the issue of polarisation will remain. Political polarisation, unfortunately, is not unique to Georgia. It is everywhere in Europe and in the United States. It is a recommendation that is very vaguely formulated. It is extremely difficult to measure the level of polarisation or the level of depolarisation because there is no internationally accepted scale of polarisation. We will try our best. One of the examples of depolarisation is that when we need to implement some of the EU recommendations, we need support from the opposition to implement those recommendations and we need their votes. On many occasions, for example, in the context of election reform, we had the votes of the Opposition. We also had the votes of the Opposition on the gender document, on the human rights strategy and on the election of the new ombudsman and public defender. All of this can be regarded as an attempt to depolarise. Of course, we are not naïve. We do not think we will not have political polarisation in a country where there are nine political parties in Parliament, starting from the extreme left all the way to the anarchists.