Defending Georgia’s Fragile Dream of Democracy and Inclusion
September 17, 2024 — Yesterday, the Treasury Department imposed the highest level of U.S. sanctions for human rights violations on two officials and two media figures in Georgia.
Specifically, invoking the Global Magnitsky Act, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Konstantine Morgoshia and Zurab Makharadze, leaders of the pro-Kremlin media outlet, Alt-Info, for spreading hate speech and disinformation against marginalized communities and for directly calling for violence against peaceful demonstrators in July 2021 and 2023.
Additionally, OFAC sanctioned security officials Zviad Kharazishvili and Mileri Lagazauri for their role in conducting the violent suppression of protests against the so-called foreign agents law passed this past May.
The Council for Global Equality strongly applauds these sanctions, noting the critical importance of defending democracy, civil society, and fundamental human rights in Georgia, especially for the country’s LGBTQI+ people and other marginalized populations.
The Republic is a candidate for European Union membership with aspirations of joining NATO — and Georgia is also a primary target of the alliance between Russian authoritarians and the Western anti-gender movement.
This urgency is all the more evident following today’s response from Tbilisi, wherein Prime Minister Irakil Kobakhidze of the pro-Moscow ruling Georgian Dream party lashed out at both the U.S. sanctions and the proposed E.U. visa restrictions for the country’s citizens.
Most dramatically, Georgia’s Parliament passed — in an 84-0 vote boycotted by the opposition — an anti-LGBTQI+ “family values and protection of minors” bill that has been pending since the passage of the foreign agents bill in May. The new bill, modeled directly on Russian legislation, bans Pride marches, same-sex marriage, adoption by same-sex couples, gender-affirming surgery, and positive reference to LGBTQI+ people in the media.
While President Salome Zourabichvili, an independent, is very likely to veto the bill, Georgian Dream holds enough seats in Parliament to override a veto. This would repeat the party’s vote to override Zourabichvili’s veto of the foreign agents law, which she declared “unconstitutional, that is, non-Georgian, non-European and non-democratic,” and that it “thoroughly mirrored the spirit of the Russian law.”
In the wake of today’s vote, Tamara Jakeli, director of the campaign group Tbilisi Pride, told Reuters, “This law is the most terrible thing to happen to the LGBT community in Georgia. We will most likely have to shut down. There is no way for us to continue functioning.”
In yesterday’s sanctions announcement, Acting Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Bradley T. Smith explained, this action “underscores our concern about the consequences of anti-democratic actions in Georgia and efforts by key individuals to use violence and intimidation to achieve their aims … The United States remains committed to holding accountable those who seek to undermine the rights of the Georgian people.”
Additionally, the State Department imposed visa restrictions on more than 60 Georgian individuals and their family members responsible for, or complicit in, undermining democracy in Georgia. These actions build on the new visa restriction policy announced in May in response to Georgian Dream’s introduction of the Russian-style “foreign agents law.”
Yesterday’s sanctions announcements do not directly reference LGBTQI+ rights, but there can be little doubt — especially in the wake of today’s homophobic and transphobic reactions by the Georgian Parliament — that the GLOMAG sanctions levied against Konstantine Morgoshia and Zurab Makharadze reflect, at least in part, their leading roles whipping up the violent mobs that disrupted both the 2021 and 2023 Tbilisi Pride marches.
In 2021, Tbilisi Pride advertised a series of Pride Week events culminating in the planned July 5th March for Dignity. In response, Morgoshia, Makharadze, and oligarch-turned-politician Levan Vasadze used Alt-Info and its social media networks to incite hate and violence against LGBTQI+ people and independent Georgia media that they considered pro-LGBTQI+. Vasadze was previously instrumental in organizing the vigilantes who prevented the June 2019 Tbilisi Pride march from taking place.
Vasadze, it also must be noted, brought to Tbilisi the 2016 meeting of the World Congress of Families (WCF), drawing thousands of anti-LGBTQI+ activists to the Georgian capital. WCF — founded in the late 1990s by American and Russian archconservative academics and heavily funded by already sanctioned Russian oligarchs Konstantin Malofeev and Vladimir Yakunin — is the largest global alliance of activists opposed to LGBTQI+ rights, abortion, birth control, and sex education.
Those in attendance included Alexey Komov and Brian Brown. Komov, a former WCF Board member, has been Malofeev’s right-hand man in promoting the anti-gender movement across Europe, including in Georgia. Brown, meanwhile, has served as President of the U.S.-based National Organization for Marriage since 2010 and co-founded the International Organization for the Family in 2016. Komov and Brown have served together on the Board of CitizenGo, the online platform founded in Spain to fight “homosexual activist tyranny,” abortion, and “gender ideology.”
Just weeks before the 2021 March for Dignity, Vasadze held a press conference at the Tbilisi Marriott announcing his formal entry into Georgian politics and warning that everyday Georgians would show up to stop the “anti-Christian and anti-Georgian activity” of the March. Alongside Vasadze sat Brown, who expressed his support for his “dear friend” and told Georgians that LGBTQI+ activism would undermine their freedom, their faith, and their country, while teasing the possibility of support for Vasadze and the Georgian far-right from former “President Trump himself.”
As Vasadze hinted at violence to disrupt the 2021 Tbilisi Pride events, Makharadze and Morgoshia were far more direct. Makharadze declared on YouTube that violence “is the right way and if these people [LGBTQI+ activists] won’t stop, then the violence against them will get worse”; he later announced he was an “oppressor” ready to “defend [his] homeland with force and violence.” Meanwhile, Morgoshia warned on social media that “nobody [would] be able to protect activists in the streets.” Thousands of people viewed these and other Alt-Info videos promising a violent response to Tbilisi Pride week.
Morgoshia and Makharadze orchestrated the violent groups that occupied downtown Tbilisi on the day of the March for Dignity. Those attackers stormed the offices of local NGOs (including that of Tbilisi Pride) and injured more than fifty people, mostly journalists — including one TV cameraman who died a week later from the injuries he suffered at the hands of the anti-LGBTQI+ mob. As Amnesty International noted at the time, Georgian officials thoroughly failed to protect peaceful demonstrators and journalists from the violence that Morgoshia, Makharadze, and their colleagues openly telegraphed in advance.
Last year, in advance of the 2023 Tbilisi Pride festival, Konstantine Morgoshia declared via the Alt-Info News channel on Telegram that “July 8th [the date of the festival] will be the final nail in the coffin of July 5,” 2021, invoking the deadly violence at Pride two years earlier. In turn, Zurab Makharadze posted a video on another Alt-Info Telegram channel directing followers when and where to meet on July 8th to disrupt the Pride festival.
On that Saturday, hundreds of far-right extremists stormed the 2023 Tbilisi Pride festival, forcing the cancellation of the event yet once more. And once more, Georgian security forces thoroughly failed to protect citizens exercising their fundamental rights to freedom of peaceful expression and assembly and equally failed to contain the anti-LGBTQI+ mobs.
The abysmal security response and the Georgian state’s failure to protect those attending Tbilisi Pride in either 2021 or 2023 speaks to the bigger picture of the threat to democracy, civil society, and human rights in the country. To be sure, Morgoshia and Makhardze fully merit Global Magnitsky sanctions for their enthusiastic, unrepentant efforts to organize pogroms against LGBTQI+ Georgians and against even those journalists who would report accurately on the events unfolding.
But their violent bigotry tugs at the larger fault line underlying the country’s future: will Georgia be fully welcomed into the democratic, inclusive community of Europe or will it succumb to the authoritarians trying to pull it into Moscow’s orbit?
Two months before Tbilisi Pride 2023, the far-right Conservative Party launched a campaign to adopt a Russian-style anti-LGBTQI+ “propaganda” law. Not long after, then-Prime Minister Irakil Garibashivili attended the CPAC conference in Budapest, where he firmly aligned Georgia with the anti-gender movement bankrolled by Russian oligarchs as well religious extremists from the United States, Spain and Latin America, and elsewhere.
Garibashvili parroted their rhetoric, warning of forces seeking to undermine traditional values and promote “gender-affirming procedures for children,” declaring, “the family is a union between a man and a woman; where a woman is a mother, and a man is a father.” And just before the violence at the 2023 Tbilisi Pride festival, Garibashvili delivered his annual address to the Georgian Parliament, in which he claimed, “LGBT propaganda had infiltrated kindergartens in the E.U. and U.S.,” calling this a “catastrophe” that demanded an anti-propaganda law.
The true catastrophe, as evidenced by today’s developments in Tbilisi, is how Georgian Dream is steering the country into an anti-democratic nightmare, governed by Russian-style authoritarian laws and drenched in the anti-LGBTQI+ ideology of the global far-right movement. Monday’s announcement of Global Magnitsky sanctions against Konstantine Morgoshia and Zurab Makharadze, as well as against Zviad Kharazishvili and Mileri Lagazauri, are very welcome steps reminding Georgia’s leaders that undermining democracy and excluding marginalized communities comes with a cost.