Comment: Georgia’s ruling party steps up its assault on the country’s LGBTQ+ people

One year ago, anti-LGBTQ+ protesters violently disrupted a Pride festival in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, and forced its cancellation. The attack was not unprecedented: assaults on LGBTQ+ events in the country are a regular occurrence.

Georgia’s LGBTQ+ people are also often used as scapegoats by political parties to distract the population from problems such as widespread poverty and inequality. So, with parliamentary elections coming up in October, Tbilisi Pride decided it would not hold any public events in 2024. In a post on Facebook, the organisers cited concerns about safety and hostile pre-election rhetoric.

But the future of events such as the Pride festival has now become uncertain for another reason, too. The country’s ruling Georgian Dream party, which is seeking a historic fourth term in office, wants to introduce a series of bans that would curtail the rights of LGBTQ+ people, including their freedoms of speech and assembly.

Georgian Dream is no stranger to queerphobic rhetoric. And it has responded to the violence and discrimination against gender and sexual minorities only reluctantly, if at all. However, the party’s abuse of its parliamentary majority against LGBTQ+ people marks a new chapter in the struggle for their rights.

The ruling party launched its legislative assault on LGBTQ+ rights in early spring when it announced it would introduce constitutional changes to “protect family values and minors”. But, as Georgian Dream lacked the required constitutional majority and the opposition was unlikely to support the government’s initiatives, the move was dismissed as a distraction.

Georgian Dream reintroduced the idea in June as a set of bills requiring a simple majority, which the party possesses with its satellite movement, People’s Power. The legislative proposal consists of a law “on family values and protection of minors” and amendments to several existing laws.

It seeks to erase information “promoting” LGBTQ+ topics from public spaces, educational settings and broadcasting. It also targets trans people specifically, proposing to ban gender-affirming medical treatments and legal transitioning, as well as punishing employers if they respect a trans person’s gender identity.

LGBTQ+ people would be banned from adopting children, too. And marriage would be limited to the heterosexual union of two cisgender people – or those of “different biological sexes” in the language of the proposal.

The package passed its first reading on June 27. Its second and third readings are expected to take place when parliament reopens in September in the run-up to the parliamentary elections.

A new chapter

The proposal marks a new stage in Georgian Dream’s use of queerphobia to score political points. Until now, the party has mostly avoided taking overt measures against LGBTQ+ people. Its strategy has instead been a combination of stoking anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments in society by engaging in queerphobic rhetoric, and failing to act on anti-queer violence or placing the blame on the victims.

In 2021, for instance, the then prime minister, Irakli Gharibashvili, called on Tbilisi Pride activists to drop their plan to hold a public Pride march, claiming this would provoke a negative reaction from society.

Far-right protesters broke into the office of Tbilisi Pride on the day of the event, forcing organisers to cancel the march. Only a handful of perpetrators were prosecuted and no one was held accountable for organising the assault, something the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association attributed to the state’s “lack of necessary will”. Gharibashvili later blamed the activists for acting against the will of the majority.

At the same time, the country’s aspirations to become a member of the EU seemingly imposed a limit on what Georgian Dream could tolerate. The state provided heavy police protection to LGBTQ+ events attended by foreign diplomats under the condition that they took place in private venues. This allowed Tbilisi Pride to organise a festival in 2022 without major incidents.

This contract broke down in 2023. The police put up little resistance to a group of anti-LGBTQ+ protesters who stormed the venue of the Tbilisi Pride festival hours before its start. Tbilisi Pride concluded that the state must have colluded with the protesters by allowing them to break up the event before the arrival of international guests.

Around this time, representatives of Georgian Dream also doubled down on their ultra-conservative and queerphobic rhetoric. On July 3, the Democratic Research Institute reported that while “homophobic and anti-gender rhetoric was a niche of far-right groups” in previous years, “today it has been completely taken over by Georgian Dream”.

The party is moving beyond the use of hate speech and tolerating anti-queer violence to persecuting LGBTQ+ people. The consequences will be far-reaching. But the effect will be most devastating for trans people, who already face exclusion from the labour market, discrimination in access to healthcare, and abuse.

It will ban educational and visibility campaigns, and it could also hinder the less visible but no less crucial work of NGOs that provide services to LGBTQ+ people. Some of these organisations have already been targeted by the so-called foreign agents law, which parliament approved recently amid massive street protests.

The legislative package will also deliver a blow to Georgia’s prospects of becoming a member of the EU. In 2022, the European Commission identified “the protection of human rights of vulnerable groups” as one of the 12 priorities Georgia was supposed to address to be granted candidate status.

Activists hope that electoral defeat for Georgian Dream in the upcoming elections would lead to the scrapping of both controversial laws. However, polls indicate that Georgian Dream remains the most popular party, and previous elections have been marked by allegations of pressure on voters and “an unprecedented use of administrative resources” to the ruling party’s advantage.

Links

• Original article in The Conversation
• David Rypel's academic profile
• UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)
• UCL Arts & Humanities