Day: June 23, 2025

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot expressed regret over the attack on Iranian nuclear sites by the United States and denied his country’s participation, Azernews reports.

The International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), Georgia’s key election watchdog, has become the latest civil society organization to be inspected by the Anti-Corruption Bureau, a public agency.

ISFED is the eighth civil society group over the past week to be served with a court order requesting sensitive information covering the period from January 1, 2024, to June 10, 2025, including confidential data of those under their legal protection. Other CSOs include Transparency International (TI) Georgia, Sapari, Economic Policy Research Center, Civil Society Foundation, Georgia’s Future Academy, Social Justice Center, and Media Development Foundation.

The receipt of these court orders “indicates that Georgian Dream and the state bodies under its full control continue to use the recently adopted anti-constitutional and anti-democratic legislation against civil society,” ISFED said in a June 23 statement.

ISFED said the Bureau’s request to the court cited Georgia’s Law on Political Associations, the Law on Grants, and the Law on Combating Corruption as grounds for inspection. The request “does not properly clarify” the necessity of the requested data, the watchdog argued.

• Irakli Kobakhidze: ISFED Works on Behalf of Forces that Don’t Have Good Intentions Toward Georgia

Civil society groups inspected by the Bureau said the orders are unjustified, warning against the breach of the privacy of beneficiaries and the confidentiality of advocacy work. The organizations have pledged to appeal the orders and vowed not to hand over sensitive data about beneficiaries to authorities.

Anti-Corruption Bureau head Razhden Kuprashvili said on June 18 that the Bureau’s goal was to “expose” organizations whose activities do not match their declared goals and that are secretly engaged in political activities.

Civil society groups argued that their public advocacy and voter mobilization efforts are being wrongly labeled as political activity. Citing the Bureau’s requests to courts, the representatives of affected CSOs said they were targeted over activities like “go-out-and-vote” campaigns, public speeches by organization heads, legal aid services, criticism of Georgian Dream’s legislative work, social media posts on different social campaigns, or posts in solidarity with ongoing protests, among others.

Also Read:

• 18/06/2025 – Five Organizations Report Being Inspected Under “Russian Laws”
• 08/05/2025 – Interview | Levan Natroshvili, New Executive Director of ISFED
• 19/03/2021 – ISFED Slams Georgian Dream Chair Over Repeated PVT Fraud Allegations
  

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Two men carrying wineskins in Georgia; postcard 1909. via American Association of Wine Economists AAWE #GeorgianWine