In Georgia, parliament has approved the clampdown on LGBTQ rights. Borrell: “Moving further and further away from EU membership”

Brussels – With the final approval of the law on “family values and child protection,” Georgia is “moving further away” from its path to the European Union, as the measure that undermines the rights of the LGBTQ community is the latest in a series of clampdowns announced by Tbilisi on the rule of law: from the ‘foreign agents’ law to threats to ban opposition parties after elections scheduled for October 26. In a note, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, called on the government led by Giorgi Kobakhidze and President Salomé Zourabichvili, in particular, to withdraw the law.

According to Borrell, the law “will undermine the fundamental rights of the people and increase discrimination and stigma.” The new regulations amend Article 30 of the Georgian Constitution, adding references to various issues such as marriage, adoption, fostering of children, medical interventions related to gender identity, gender recognition in documents, and using gender-related terms in official communiqués and the media sphere. More importantly, the law sanctions the recognition as a family – and its protection – only in the union of a man (“biologically male”) and a woman (“biologically female”).

With the adoption of the new legislation, therefore, the South Caucasus country moves even further away from the prospect of accession to the Twenty-seven bloc, lengthening the list of measures that are incompatible with European standards with regard, above all, to the maintenance of democracy and the rule of law. Already following the adoption of the pro-Russian-inspired law on ‘transparency of foreign influence,’ which stipulates that all organizations that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad should register as an ‘organization pursuing the interests of a foreign power,’ the European Council effectively froze Georgia’s path to EU membership.

In the same way as what happened last spring over the law on foreign agents, the pro-European president Zourabichvili seems intent on rejecting the law. But the government led by the Georgian Dream party is not worried because it has an overwhelming majority in Parliament that would allow it to circumvent the president’s veto and thus enact the law before the election date, which will be decisive at this point in charting Tbilisi’s path to the EU.

The Georgian Parliament adopted laws on ‘family values and protection of minors’ which will undermine the fundamental rights of the people and increase discrimination & stigmatisation.
I call on Georgia to withdraw this legislation, further derailing the country from its EU path.

– Josep Borrell Fontelles (@JosepBorrellF) September 18, 2024