7 May 2024 | Europe and Central Asia, Georgia, News
In the south-eastern corner of Europe, in the small country of Georgia, a monumental struggle is unfolding between the government’s authoritarian ambitions and civil society’s determination to advance fundamental freedoms.
Tens of thousands have been out of the streets of the capital Tbilisi protesting the planned adoption of the Russian-style “foreign agent” law which labels NGOs and media outlets receiving more than 20% foreign funding as “organisations acting in the interest of a foreign power”. The adoption of such a law threatens the country’s vibrant civil society and dashes the dreams of Georgians who want European Union integration. If the law comes into effect, democratic norms across Eastern Europe are likely to be negatively affected, with communities of human rights defenders coming under increasing pressure from governments tempted to follow suit. All who care about freedom and democracy need to take action now and demonstrate global solidarity for Georgian civil society.
On 3 April 2024, Georgia’s ruling party, the Georgian Dream Party, announced that they were resurrecting the so-called “foreign agent” draft law, almost entirely copying the text defeated by mass protests in March 2023. The passing of such a law would give organs of the state sweeping powers to carry out extensive inspections of NGOs and media organisations and forcibly put them on a special registry. Non-compliance would result in heavy fines. The law was adopted at its second reading on 1 May 2024 against the backdrop of furious mass protests outside the Parliament. The third and final reading is scheduled for 17 May.
Contrary to the declared aims of the authorities to increase transparency within civil society, the draft is a key legal instrument straight out of the Russian authoritarian playbook. It goes without saying that such a law violates freedom of association. Over 150 civic and media organisations in Georgia have already vowed not to register, potentially resulting in many people who are victims of abuse being left without vital services and without support in their fight for justice.
The revival of restrictive legislation against NGOs is part of a larger pattern of assault against a broad range of human rights in Georgia. In recent years, civil society and international human rights bodies have raised numerous concerns about the narrowing civic space for free expression and protest. They have highlighted illegal surveillance, attempts at criminalisation of legitimate human rights work, smear campaigns and increased physical attacks particularly on the LGBT population, coupled with impunity for often violent far-right political groups. The democratic decline in the country is confirmed by international civil society rankings, with Georgia dropping staggeringly low on the World Press Freedom Index, and being assessed as becoming a “semi-consolidated authoritarian regime”.
Last month in other assaults on the rights of women and minority groups the Georgian Parliament hastily abolished mandatory gender quotas for women within political party lists and initiated constitutional amendments which threaten to outlaw LGBTQI-related expression and protest. Georgia holds parliamentary elections on 26 October 2024, and the proposed “foreign agent” law calls into question the ability of NGOs to roll out their usual large-scale election observation missions, which have traditionally played a key role in ensuring elections are free and fair.
Understandably, Georgian civil society and the public have not been sitting idly in the face of such an existential threat to democracy and civic space. One of the key victories of civil society was the success in countering the official narrative about alleged lack of foreign funding transparency. Human rights defenders and activists successfully made the wider public aware that the law was about Russian-style authoritarianism with more repression to follow, and it would totally undermine Georgia’s European integration, which enjoys a steadfast 79–83% support and is guaranteed by the Constitution. Hence the main protest slogan: “Yes to Europe, No to Russian Law”.
The shifting of narrative also worked because the Georgian public remembers the term “foreign agent” and its negative connotations which hark back to Stalinist repression. In the 1930s, a whole generation of Georgian intellectuals were executed on trumped-up charges, accused of being “spies” of various Western states.
Since parliamentary hearings on the law began in mid-April, protests have been unrelenting. They are mostly organised horizontally and led by students and young adults, dubbed as “Gen Z”. Georgia has a population of just 3.7 million, which makes the gathering of more than 100,000 people in front of the Parliament all the more extraordinary. The opposition to the law has gripped the entire society, with theatre performances across Georgia ending in declarations of protest against the law. Sportspeople, football clubs, some businesses, writers and cultural workers, teachers, start-ups, bloggers, doctors and academics have come together to condemn the government’s plans.
The law enforcement uses illegal and largely disproportionate force against mostly peaceful protesters. Tear gas, stun grenades, pepper spray and water cannons are almost a daily occurrence, with documented cases of likely illegal use of rubber bullets and beatings, judged tantamount to ill-treatment and torture. Yet, the protesters stand firm.
The anticipated descent of Georgia into the authoritarian abyss will be felt more widely across Eastern Europe, where human rights defenders face many risks due to wars or repressive regimes. Despite negative trends and proven cases of cross-border intimidation of dissidents, Georgia is still a place of temporary shelter and a relatively safe space for those who can no longer carry out civic work in their own countries, or who need a brief respite. All this is expected to vanish with the adoption of “foreign agent” law.
International condemnation of recent events has been unanimous. The European Union has made it clear that the proposed draft legislation undermines Georgia’s EU accession path. Yet, the government rhetoric remains in the eyes of many of us unhinged, brazen and threatening. The authorities seem to be set on adopting the “foreign agent” law at all costs. This would signify a U-turn regarding Georgia’s place within the international rules-based order. Moreover, what is at stake is the end of a vibrant civil society which has played a role in upholding fundamental freedoms within and beyond national borders. International organisations, civil society and like-minded states should leverage all legal means available to exert pressure on the authorities and be even more vocal in their support to the Georgian public and human rights defenders. They need to act today. Tomorrow could be too late.
8 Mar 2024 | Europe and Central Asia, News, Russia
“Don’t go over there,” a woman warned Yaroslav Smolev – artist and musician – as he was approaching the monument to victims of Soviet-era repression in St Petersburg. He then saw the police arresting people who, like him, came to lay flowers. One of the men had his arms twisted by the officers. This was on 16 February, the day Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died, and hundreds of people came to honour him at improvised memorials.
Smolev, who spoke to Index four days later, said that the police were pushing mourners away from the monument. “We found ourselves standing [at a distance], not knowing what to do or where to go from there,” he said.
But despite the brutality of the police, he recalled seeing “mountains of flowers” at the memorial.
The next day Smolev staged a solo protest in the city centre holding a sign which read “Navalny was killed because we didn’t care.” He felt that he had to speak up, remembering Alexei Navalny who “always stood up for what he believed in – in a peaceful way”.
“I knew that I wouldn’t be allowed to stand there for a long time,” Smolev said. Some people walking by gave him sympathetic looks. One woman approached him and said: “Thank you for speaking up.”
Shortly afterwards, he was taken to the police station. The officers threatened to forcibly take his fingerprints and measurements. According to Smolev, they didn’t have the right to request these. “They said: ‘If you refuse, we will put you upside down, and get all the prints we need, from the top of your head to your heels’,” he told Index.
An officer threatened to throw him in a detention cell for “disobedience”. He told Smolev: “Handsome men like you are always in high demand [among the inmates in jail].”
Smolev had to advocate for himself as all the lawyers were busy that day. He refused to give in and was released three hours later. He would have to pay a fine of about 4,000 rubles ($44) for “violation of anti-COVID measures” – for standing on a sidewalk with a sign.
Smolev said that above all he fears that his home will be targeted now, like was the case after his peaceful protests in the past.
According to Dmitri Anisimov, a spokesman for OVD-Info, an organisation monitoring repression in Russia, at least 462 Navalny mourners were detained across the country, almost half of them in St Petersburg alone. No less than 78 were jailed up to 15 days. In some cases, people were not allowed to see their lawyers. Echoing Smolev’s story, Anisimov told Index that if the detained found themselves face-to-face with the police officers, anything could happen to them. At least six people were beaten up during their detention. Anisimov said that the police also handed out draft notices to some men who came to the improvised memorials for Navalny. Later these papers turned out to be fake. It’s one of the various intimidation tactics used by the authorities, he said.
At least 15 mourners were detained days after they came to the memorials, at their homes or on public transportation. Many of them were “in a state of shock” because they were unprepared for this, Anisimov said. According to him, they had been tracked through a system of surveillance cameras. Some of the people Index was going to speak to got scared off after these “delayed detentions”.
During the days following Navalny’s death, dozens of volunteers provided support for those detained and given jail time. Ekaterina, a 28-year-old democracy activist, was one of them.
Talking to Index from St Petersburg, she said that many people were placed in remote detention centres. She brought food for the detained: “Some bread, sausages, cheese, a little bit of sweets and water.”
She has been doing this volunteer work for two years, since she was detained during the anti-war protests which followed the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She told Index that people awaiting trial in detention centres are not fed properly – if at all – and are not always able to access tap water.
For Ekaterina, even though it may seem that with Navalny now gone all hope is lost, people “must continue searching for hope within each other”. “We need to help people who are still alive,” she added. “People such as political prisoners.”
When Navalny died on 16 February, she came to an impromptu memorial in St. Petersburg. There were no police around at that moment. “People came and came,” she recalled and she “got a chance to stand there and cry.”
The same day, a woman in Rostov-on-Don, around 1,800 km south of St Petersburg, also came to leave flowers in memory of Navalny at the monument to the victims of political repressions.
“There were so many police officers,” she said speaking to Index anonymously. The buses for the detained were parked next to the memorial and the police were filming people who brought bouquets. “I realised that nothing good would come out of it for me,” she said. “Call me a coward, but I decided to turn around and leave.”
Two days later the woman found out that the apartment where she is officially registered – but doesn’t live – was targeted. A police officer came to give her “some kind of warning”. She suspects that the authorities might have identified her by the car license plate while she was at the memorial – and now they are looking for her.
One of her friends, whom she had warned about the risks, came to the memorial for Navalny later that day. He was ordered by the police to write a letter of explanation stating reasons for his presence at the site.
“There are no mass killings by the authorities, nor people being hanged – but it feels that way,” the woman said. “We are so frightened that we don’t dare utter a single word, and I was too scared to even lay flowers!,” she added, outraged.
Despite this “climate of terror and fear”, as she called it, she empathised that there were many people at the memorial, who felt that it was their duty to honor Navalny.
“I think that Navalny was right when he said in a documentary about him that [if the authorities decide to kill him it means that] we’re incredibly strong,” Ekaterina, the democracy activist, told Index.
In the film his main message to the Russian people was “not to give up”.
8 Sep 2023 | News, Opinion, Ruth's blog, United Kingdom
Cast your mind back to January 2023, and the “world-leading, world-first Online Safety Bill” (Rishi Sunak responding to Labour’s Alex Davies-Jones) faced a significant backbench rebellion over an executive liability clause.
When the Bill landed in the House of Lords days later, a precarious agreement between Government and rebels had passed on a vast baton of legislative issues. There was a collective sigh of relief that the upper chamber would be taking on the mantle.
The threat to encryption, or private messaging, didn’t even feature as a concern amongst legislators, let alone the government, despite the Bill introducing measures unprecedented in any western democracy.
Flash forward to September, and encryption features as the most important and urgent issue that needs addressing before the Online Safety Act receives imminent Royal Assent.
The efforts of my colleagues at Index on Censorship, partners across civil society, and the businesses that rely on encryption have all been vital in achieving this.
Confidence in the Government’s ability to grasp the full consequences and details of their legislation has waned thin. Index and others have consistently warned that Section 122 of the Act is a gateway to the unprecedented mass-surveillance of British citizens and a threat to vulnerable people up and down the country.
As Index on Censorship’s report with Matthew Ryder KC set out:
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Section 122 notices install the right to impose technologies that would intercept and scan private communications on a mass scale. The principle that the state can mandate the surveillance of millions of lawful users of private messaging apps should require a higher threshold of justification which has not been established to date.
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Ofcom could impose surveillance on all private messaging users with a notice, underpinned by significant financial penalties, with less legal protections than equivalent powers under the Invetsigatory Powers Act.
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The proposed interferences with the rights of UK citizens arising from surveillance under the Bill are unlikely to be in accordance with the law and are open to legal challenge.
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Journalists will not be properly protected from state surveillance, risking source confidentiality and endangering human rights defenders and vulnerable communities.
From raising awareness of encryption in public debate, demonstrating its real-world effects for policy makers, to highlighting the unintended legal and technological consequences of the Bill, we finally have a Government that is at least not running head first into an attack on encryption that would be unprecedented in any democracy.
But the encryption die remains far from cast. Reports in the FT and elsewhere alluded to a Government ‘u-turn’ ahead of a Ministerial statement on Wednesday (6 September) that delivered nothing of the sort.
While some in the Government are briefing that encryption will be protected, the actions of its ministers do not match up to those words.
A new report by Index on Censorship this week revealed that that Online Safety Bill has alarming consequences when put alongside the controversial Investigatory Powers Act (snooper’s charter). This access, unprecedented in any Western democracy, could provide the Home Office with entry to British citizens’ personal messages as follows:.
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Ofcom issues notice mandating the use of Accredited Technology to provide a backdoor to encrypted messages under the Online Safety Bill (section 122)
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The Home Office or security services apply for a bulk surveillance warrant on account of a matter of national security (Investigatory Powers Act) granting them access to bulk data
This is extremely concerning, not least because the window in which the Government can legislate its way out of this mess is rapidly closing. The Online Safety Bill will return to the House of Commons for the first time in eight months on Monday (11 September) for a consideration of Lords’ amendments.
This is the last and only chance the Government has to follow up words with actions. They must go beyond Wednesday’s ministerial statement and allay the concerns once and for all by amending the Bill’s Section 122 notices as well excluding use of the IPA in conjunction with the Bill.
Our report sets out how the government can get this right. We’re running out of time. We hope that the government will see sense and put down amendments to fix the backdoor in the Online Safety Bill.
