Day: May 15, 2024

Georgia: Thousands Protest In Tbilisi After Parliament Passes ‘Foreign Agents’ Bill  Leader Publications

Azerbaijan to finish major highway in liberated areas next year  News.Az

Potential shift in Azerbaijan’s labor landscape: Benefits of hourly minimum wage  AzerNews.Az

EIB Global open to consider financing electricity, digital connections between EU and S. Caucasus – Vice-President …  Trend News Agency

Regional

• Armenian and Azerbaijani parliamentary speakers are expected to meet tomorrow in Geneva.

Armenia

• Armenia and India have agreed to set up a joint defence cooperation group. 
• Yerevan Mayor Tigran Avinyan will be in Paris to meet his French counterpart, Anne Hidalgo, today.

Azerbaijan

• A member of the Musavat party was found dead after going missing five days ago. The police have presumed that Natig Mehdi was killed
• A river in Garabaqqal, a village in Gokchay, has apparently flooded with rubbish. 

Georgia

• Parliament adopted the foreign agent law as thousands of protesters gathered outside parliament yesterday. President Salome Zourabichvili is expected to veto the law, but today stated that she ‘would not enter into artificial, deceptive negotiations’ with her veto.
• Protesters blocked Heroes Square, one of Tbilisi’s largest intersections, hours after parliament approved the law. 
• US Assistant Secretary of State James O’Brien said the US will apply travel restrictions and financial sanctions against individuals if the foreign agent law ‘goes forward’ in its current form or if there is a continued ‘undermining of democracy or violence against peaceful protesters’. The White House additionally warned that the law would ‘compel us to fundamentally reassess our relationship with Georgia’.
• Lithuania, Estonia, Iceland, and Latvia’s foreign ministers arrived in Georgia today. Germany and Lithuania’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee chairs and Czech senator Pavel Fischer addressed and joined the protesters on Tuesday night, while on a visit to Tbilisi. 
• Foreign agent protester Lazare Grigoriadis was detained at Tuesday’s protest, less than a month after being pardoned by President Salome Zourabichvili. The public defender reported that Grigoriadis, as well as other detained protesters, appeared to have sustained injuries during his detention. 

Abkhazia

• An ethnic Georgian has been detained on suspicion of spying for Georgia. Kakha Muradov is claimed to have been in touch with members of the Georgian paramilitary group Mkhedrioni as well as members of the Georgian Legion fighting in Ukraine.

 For ease of reading, we choose not to use qualifiers such as ‘de facto’, ‘unrecognised’, or ‘partially recognised’ when discussing institutions or political positions within Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. This does not imply a position on their status.

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The International Energy Agency (IEA) has lowered its forecast for global oil demand growth for the current year by 0.14 million barrels per day, to 1.1 million barrels, Report informs, citing the IEA.

Fire has engulfed the historic Egyptian Bazaar in the center of Istanbul, Report informs via Turkish media.

The establishment of stricter requirements in the financial market in Azerbaijan complicates the process of entering the market for new players in certain cases, Rashad Orujov, the First Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank of Azerbaijan, said at the FinTe

Amid reports of a possible conspiracy among law enforcement agencies, Türkiye’s Minister of Internal Affairs Ali Yerlikaya said that some forces are taking actions directed against the president and the government.