By Shorena Latatia, iwpr.net
Georgia’s parliament is on the brink of adopting a law that will ban former KGB employees from many public positions, while strengthening the powers of the security services.
The Freedom Charter bill was proposed by Gia Tortladze of the opposition Strong Georgia party, and was backed by the ruling United National Movement. The law was approved in a second reading in December, and will be finally passed when deputies return from their winter break in early February.
The law will expand the powers of law-enforcement agencies and encourage them to coordinate better on counter-terrorism measures. It will sanction the creation of a single video surveillance system for strategic buildings and shipments, and oblige banks to inform the interior ministry about large bank transfers to organisations or private individuals.
It also provides for a register of individuals who worked for the security services in the old Soviet Union, and place restrictions on the positions they can hold. Finally, it will ban both communist and fascist symbols, road-names and anything else deemed supportive of extremist ideologies.
Tortladze said the law was essential because of the security challenges now facing Georgia, in particular since Russia recognised Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states in the wake of the 2008 conflict.
“Georgia is seeking a whole range of terrorist activities pursued by the Russian security services,” he said. “I’m not even talking about the kidnappings and explosions that the occupiers are committing openly in the occupied territories [Abkhazia and South Ossetia].”
Pavle Kublashvili, a ruling party member who chairs the parliamentary committee for legal affairs, told legislators he supported “the principles and spirit of the bill” in view of “the importance of the war on terror”.
Some opposition figures and human rights activists fear the bill will make the security services too powerful and threaten the very freedoms that its backers claim to support.
During the debate, Jondi Baghaturia of the opposition Kartuli Dasi party spoke out against any expansion of police powers.
“The authorities will use this to control every citizen in the country,” he warned.
However, Baghaturia backed the proposal for “lustration” – blocking former KGB operatives from working for the state.
Human rights experts, meanwhile, worried that the government was exploiting anger at Russia and concerns about security to slip in major restrictions on basic freedoms.
Ucha Nanuashvili, director of the Human Rights Centre in Tbilisi, views the Freedom Charter as part of a general drift towards a more restrictive society.
“In the last few months, many negative changes have been passed into Georgian law, significantly curbing basic rights and freedoms of the individual. I see no need for this Freedom Charter, which will in its own way be just one more mechanism of control for the authorities,” he said.
“It’s also highly probable that the authorities will use this law as another lever with which to violate human rights. I think tension is being artificially created; an enemy image is being shaped so as to turn everyone against the opposition and civil society later on. One can’t rule out that controls on banking transactions may be used to try to cut funding sources.”
Security experts argued that since the Georgian police already enjoyed a great deal of leeway, the new powers granted to them were unnecessary.
“The Georgian police face no hindrance in the battle against terrorism,” Irakli Sesiashvili, director of the Association of Justice and Liberty, a group which carries out security-sector research. “Even without this charter, we all know that our telephone calls are being listened to and that we aren’t living in a democracy. The authorities are just scaring the public and demonstrating that they can do what they want.”
Sesiashvili warned that the bill’s architects could become “the grave-diggers of democracy”.
Many of the Freedom Charter’s provisions are similar to those laid out in the Patriot Act passed in the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Critics of the Georgian bill pointed out that the US Supreme Court cancelled much of the Patriot Act’s content four years later.
Shorena Latatia is a freelance journalist in Georgia
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