Georgia¶
The Georgian cases show a register of foreign ties assembled in stages, each presented as transparency and each extending the one before. Declaring becomes an obligation, failing to declare a crime, and keeping the register a task for an auditing office, so political suspicion takes the form of financial compliance. Outside advice has arrived after the decisions it concerned, and the instrument runs ahead of its use.
The clerk’s briefs¶
From the clerks, for the Patrician’s eyes
Read these. Organisations that take money from abroad must choose between registering under a label of foreign influence, giving up the money, or closing, and some will choose before anyone asks; their staff, partners and the people they serve lose whatever goes. Donors abroad find their support turned into a liability for those they fund. Whoever governs next inherits the database and the criminal law behind it, and a register of this kind needs no further law to be turned on new targets. Repeal, as the Venice Commission asked, or a government willing to close the register, would end it.
May 2026: Both registers, one office¶
From 15 May 2026 the Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence also names the State Audit Office, in place of the National Agency of Public Registry: organisations that draw more than 20 per cent of their annual income from a foreign power apply to it for registration, it publishes their statements, and it may “carry out, at any time, monitoring”. The clerks note that both of Georgia’s registers of foreign ties are now kept by the same office.
March 2026: A new keeper for the register¶
From 2 March 2026 the Foreign Agents Registration Act names the State Audit Office, in place of the Anti-Corruption Bureau, as the body that receives registration statements, requests further documents and maintains the public database. By June, according to Human Rights Watch as reported by Civil Georgia, the office had opened monitoring proceedings against one organisation, still pending on 1 June. The clerks note that the register changed keeper and kept its contents.
April 2025: The copy of the copy¶
On 1 April 2025 the Georgian parliament passed a Foreign Agents Registration Act in its third reading, with 86 votes in favour. The parliament’s own announcement says the act provides for criminal liability for evading registration. It arrived a year after the 2024 law on transparency of foreign influence. The clerks note that the first law made ties abroad something to declare, and the second makes not declaring them a crime. International ties rewritten as disloyalty, in two laws and three readings.
May 2024: Venice asks for repeal¶
On 21 May 2024 the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission advised Georgia to repeal the Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence in its current form. It found that the law’s limits on association, expression and privacy failed the tests of legality, necessity and proportionality, and it noted that parliament had adopted the law before the opinion was ready. The clerks observe that the advice arrived in good order, after the vote.