Ms Maia Bitadze:

I thank the committee for hosting our delegation. I have a few remarks and will wrap up then. We are colleagues and politicians and we know we are living in an era of headlines and propaganda. The location of Georgia, our geopolitical situation and our history show how challenging the path to the European Union is for us. I remind the committee that our Government and our party signed an association agreement and worked on visa liberalisation to the European Union. It was our pre-election pledge to submit an application to join the European Union. I am talking about the hard work we have been doing all these years to harmonise all legislation, to make big reforms in all fields, to boost the economy, to work on human rights, decision-making and open transparency governance methods. A member mentioned how laws should be elaborated. We are working in this direction and it may be that we failed in the case of the draft transparency law, which was withdrawn. We failed and we recognise that.

All of the other things are related to fake news and propaganda from the opposition, some of which are partially radical and turbulent parties, which just want to return to government. It is the elections that would help them do that. They can participate in the elections, trying to use propaganda methods and call us Russian. I want to remind the committee that if members have any questions, they can contact us. For example, one member mentioned LGBT draft law or ideas, which was surprising because that is not a case on the agenda and will never be in our country. Members have our contact details. If they have any questions or they feel the information they have been given is not correct, they can contact the ambassador or one of us and we will give them information that is true and reliable. I thank the committee.