TBILISI -- Georgia's notorious "foreign-agent" law has come into effect. But not everyone is obeying it.
Georgia formally launched its database of "organizations serving the interests of a foreign power" on August 1; NGOs and media organizations that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad were given one month to register.
That includes the Tbilisi-based International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), a Tbilisi-based election-monitoring group that gets virtually all of its funding from Western donors such as the European Union, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Washington, D.C.-based National Endowment for Democracy, and various European embassies.
But ISFED isn't registering in the database. Along with over 400 other organizations in Georgia, they are publicly refusing to submit as an act of civil disobedience.
"The 'Russian law' will not work in our country!" the organizations wrote in an open letter. "It will remain to be an unrecognized document to which none of us will obey!"
They call it the "Russian law" because, in 2012, Russia also created a registry of "foreign agents" made up of groups who got funding from abroad. Over the years, Russia's laws on foreign agents became stricter and stricter, eventually strangling nearly all independent voices in the country.
Many fear the same fate could befall Georgia, and the refuseniks here say their Russian counterparts made a tactical error by trying to comply with the first, relatively mild version of the law.
"We saw this scenario in Russia, [and] we know where it leads," Irina Mamulashvili, a program manager at ISFED, told RFE/RL.
Both the ruling Georgian Dream party and the opposition see the adoption of the law as a turning point in the country's politics.
For Georgian Dream, which pushed the law through this spring over huge street protests and the objections by its U.S. and European partners, the legislation is a necessary tool to strengthen the state's sovereignty against what it sees as the corrosive influence of foreign donors and their local "agents."
For Georgia's opposition and large NGO sector, it is rather a dangerous power grab for a ruling party they believe is bent on taking the country in an authoritarian, anti-Western direction.
By demonstratively refusing to obey the law, the NGOs are setting the stage for a standoff with the authorities. By not registering they will face substantial fines, with unclear prospects of how to pay them.
Their hope is they can hold on and keep afloat until parliamentary elections, scheduled for October 26. If the opposition wins, it has vowed to repeal the law. If not, the organizations face an uncertain future.
"Our immediate priority is to somehow get to this election," Mamulashvili said. "After the elections," she said, "we honestly don't know what we're going to do."
Transparency Or Harassment?
The refusal to register is evidence that the groups have something to hide, Georgian Dream leaders have charged.
The ruling party released a report tracking the public disclosures of 474 organizations who had announced that they refused to register. Eighty percent of the organizations did not publicly disclose the amounts of their grants, and 70 percent did not reveal who their donors were, parliamentary speaker Shalva Papuashvili said at a July 15 briefing.
"This proves their resistance to the transparency law is not about stigmatization but about hiding how funds are spent," he said.
Party officials have further accused the NGOs' Western donors of abetting that evasion.
"We are receiving information that, on the one hand, [donors] are telling [NGOs] that the organizations that will register won't receive grants," Papuashvili told another briefing, on July 30.
"On the other hand, there are consultations on how to circumvent this law and the various ways and machinations they can use so that they do not register and, at the same time, receive grants."
Georgia's major donors have denied those allegations.
"USAID does not provide legal counsel to partners or organizations, and as such, we do not provide any advice regarding their compliance with laws," the agency told RFE/RL in a statement. "The decision whether to register lies with the organizations and is not subject to our conversation with [civil society organizations]," the EU delegation in Tbilisi told RFE/RL.
The donors and their Georgian grantees argue further that the rhetoric around "transparency" is a red herring and that as a rule the biggest organizations (including ISFED) proudly display information about their funding on their Web pages.
At a July 30 briefing to roll out the registry, Justice Minister Rati Bregadze said organizations who fail to sign up will be fined 25,000 lari (about $9,300) and would be subject to "forced registration," a phrase he has not elaborated on.
Any organization entered in the registry -- forcibly or not -- would then have 10 days to submit various forms detailing their income and expenditures. Failure to submit them would incur an additional 10,000 lari ($3,700) fine.
The amount of paperwork required came as a shock even to those who had already opposed the law. The forms required information about every expenditure the organization made and the name, personal identification number, and bank details of the person being paid for it. All the accounting had to be completed retroactively, back to 2023, bolstering critics' claims that mere transparency was not the aim.
Given how detailed the forms are, there are "serious questions about how feasible it is, especially within the time limit," said one official at a Western donor institution speaking on condition of anonymity because they didn't want to endanger their grantees.
"The level of detail required amounts to harassment," an official at a second Western donor institution said, who also requested anonymity so as not to put their grantees in danger.
Moving Abroad
Although there are over 20,000 "nonentrepreneurial legal entities" -- the formal term in Georgia for the organizations subject to the law -- on the books, most of those are inactive, and there are probably somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 groups actually operating, the first donor official estimated.
It's not known how many intend to register, and strategies for those who intend to evade the law vary. While some plan to openly defy the law, others hope that by moving their legal registration abroad they can both continue to do their work in Georgia legally without having to register.
One opposition news website, Tabula.ge, announced it would be dropping its domain name and moving to a yet-undisclosed European country to keep publishing.
"Tabula is a Georgian media [organization]. It will remain a Georgian media [organization], and it will continue to do Georgian work," its editor in chief, Levan Sutidze, told RFE/RL's Georgian Service. In Europe, he said, Tabula "will be legally protected from the influence and manipulations of the Russian government."
Another organization is shutting down and planning to recenter operations in Armenia, the group's head told RFE/RL on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.
"It is a very big fine," the person said. "We really don't have the resources to pay out the fines, because we can barely make ends meet."
The organization's plan is to continue to operate in Georgia, but pay employees in Georgia from the Armenian bank account. Given that the "foreign-agent" law only applies to organizations, not individuals, the organization's lawyers advised them that would not violate the law.
Georgian-based donors say they can keep funding organizations who do that.
"In principle, there is no problem registering in another country," the first donor official said. "If you keep a bank account here [in Georgia] and open an affiliated entity abroad, we can pay to the bank in the other country and they can move the money to Georgia."
Still, Georgian Dream leaders have criticized organizations planning to move abroad. Parliamentary speaker Papuashvili called the idea "ridiculous and beyond the bounds of seriousness." Organizations who legally move abroad but continue to work in Georgia "directly turn into a foreign actor," Papuashvili said.
The first donor official said further amendments to the law were likely: "If people find loopholes, the government will close them very quickly."
'Not Everyone Can Afford to Be So Principled'
While a relatively small number of Tbilisi-based, politically engaged NGOs have been at the center of this conflict, the law equally affects the many more civic organizations around the country who help citizens and get foreign grants to do it. And for many of them, paying such a large fine just isn't an option.
"I don't know why they did that [imposed such a large financial penalty]. They knew very well that it's very difficult for local organizations to mobilize those kind of funds," said Marika Mghebrishvili, head of the Biliki organization in the central Georgian city of Gori.
Biliki runs a variety of educational and social programs for children in Gori and the surrounding region. The organization gets funding from the Georgian government to run a daycare center in Gori and from USAID to conduct civic educational programs for schoolchildren around the region.
In response to the law, Biliki is splitting into two organizations: one for foreign-funded projects and one for the rest. Mghebrishvili told RFE/RL's Georgian Service they're not sure if they will comply with the law.
"We don't want to register, but we will know the exact answer later. We are still debating this matter," she said. "There are many unanswered questions."
In general, organizations such as Biliki are more likely to register. They are "less concerned with image and ideology" and are "service providers who don't care too much about being in some kind of registry," the first donor official said. They also are less likely to be able to afford the fine.
"Not everyone can afford to be so principled," the official said.
Still, many small, regional organizations are on the list of those vowing to flout the law -- the Akhalsopeli Youth Center, Gori Photographers' Club, and Racha Tourism Club, among others.
But the first donor official added that the government is likely to be selective in its enforcement of the law -- especially before the elections, when time is short -- and so less likely to go after apolitical service providers.
"They're not going to bother with the small organization in [the rural region of] Kakheti helping disabled people. This is designed to keep certain organizations from operating," the first official said. "At the top of the list: independent media and election watchdog organizations."
Passing The Hat
It remains unclear how the organizations who will be fined are going to pay up.
Donor-funded organizations typically get money for specific projects, with expenses accounted for in advance. Most don't have tens of thousands of dollars on hand for paying fines.
"There is no clearly defined way how we are going to pay this [fine] or from which donor, or from which budget, because we don't have a separate section for fines or something like that," ISFED's Mamulashvili said.
One possibility is crowdfunding. Another is the hope from many in Georgia's NGO community that their donors -- who have vociferously opposed the law -- might help pay the fines they incur for resisting the laws.
"I cannot say they 'should' do that, but they of course know we have project-based budgets, which is something that makes it challenging to pay fines," Mamulashvili said. "So, let's see, maybe they will also show a willingness to support us."
There is a rough precedent: Under a 2021 EU-brokered deal between Georgian Dream and the opposition, the EU paid the bail for opposition leader Nika Melia on charges related to anti-government protests he helped organize.
But officials from Western aid agencies say NGO requests to pay the fines have been repeatedly rebuffed, citing laws in their own countries.
"We're not paying the fines. It's as simple as that," said one Western diplomat based in Tbilisi, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. "We are all about observing the rule of law."
Asked whether they would pay the fines, the USAID mission in Tbilisi sent RFE/RL a statement: "Costs associated with fines and penalties are generally not covered by USAID." Asked the same question, the EU delegation in Tbilisi responded: "EU grant agreements do not make provisions for the payment of fines."
Meanwhile, a parallel group of NGOs and media organizations is pursuing lawsuits against the legislation, in Georgia's Constitutional Court and in the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights. And they are bracing for September, when they will start to see how strictly the government intends to enforce the law.
"That is the big question," the first donor official said.
"One thing that I'm sure was intentional was to keep the NGOs and media organizations distracted," the official continued. "And it's worked -- they're all figuring out how to survive at the moment."
