Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili held a special brief at the Parliament to condemn “the wave of desinformation, manipulation, and hysteria,” which, he claimed, accompanied unprecedented “attacks on the Church and its parish.” He said, “the firm perception is being shaped, that these attacks are planned in advance and coordinated” and “is reaching the dangerous limit beyond which the irreparable damage to civic peace may occur.”
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He called out Beka Mindiashvili, head of the Tolerance Center at the Public Defender’s Office, as an “active member of this campaign” who has “distinguished himself by hostile rhetoric towards the Georgian Orthodox Church. Speaker decried that Mindiashvili’s office is “apparently” not organizationally incorporated in the Public Defender’s Office but is “appropriating the name of Constitutional body” while being in reality funded by the program of USAID, “Unity in Diversity” [Due disclosure: “Unity in Diversity” is run by the UN Association of Georgia, the parent organization of Civil.ge]. The website of the Public Defender’s Office reads that the Tolerance Center has been active since 2005.
Referring to his own earlier claims, Papuashvili said, “This is not the first time USAID finds itself in the epicenter of scandal linked to the program it funds” and that he “expects that the leadership of USAID would soon bring clarity into this issue and act in the best interests of the American and Georgian people.” He argued Georgia’s “NGO sector is almost fully dominated by politicians who are conducting propaganda with foreign funding.”
In this connection, the Speaker revived the issue of transparency of CSO funding and lamented “the absence of the legislation on transparency of foreign funding.” The ruling party passed the law with this title in March 2023 but withdrew it following the public protest.
Speaker Papuashvili called on the donor community to check “whether the money of their taxpayers is funding projects and people that act contrary to our shared values in the human rights field and are aimed at the radicalization of society.”