Georgia’s president refuses to sign an anti-LGBTQ bill and returns it to parliament

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — Georgia’s president refused to sign into law a bill that severely curtails LGBTQ+ rights in the country and mirrors legislation adopted in neighboring Russia, her office said Wednesday.

Salome Zourabichvili returned the bill, introduced by the ruling party Georgian Dream and approved by lawmakers last month, to the parliament. The parliament speaker now has five days to sign it into law.

The bill includes bans on same-sex marriages, adoptions by same-sex couples and public endorsement and depictions of LGBTQ+ relations and people in the media. It also bans gender-affirming care and changing gender designations in official documents.

The parliament gave the measure its final approval as Georgia, a largely conservative country where the Orthodox Church wields significant influence, prepares to vote in a parliamentary election. The move has been widely seen as an effort by the ruling party to shore up support among conservative groups. It was decried by human rights advocates and LGBTQ+ activists for further marginalizing an already vulnerable community.

The anti-LGBTQ+ bill has drawn comparisons with Russia, where the Kremlin has been highlighting “traditional family values.” The Russian authorities in the last decade banned public endorsement of “nontraditional sexual relations” as well as laws against gender-affirming care, among other measures. Its Supreme Court effectively outlawed LGBTQ+ activism by labeling what the authorities called the LGBTQ+ “movement” operating in Russia as an extremist organization and banning it.

In Georgia, the LGBTQ+ community has struggled even before the new law was put forward. Demonstrations and violent outbursts against LGBTQ people have been common, and last year hundreds of opponents of gay rights stormed an LGBTQ+ festival in the Georgian capital, forcing the event’s cancellation. This year, tens of thousands marched in Tbilisi to promote “traditional family values.”

Just a day after the parliament gave its final approval to the anti-LGBTQ+ bill, a transgender actor and model Kesaria Avramidze was stabbed to death in her apartment in the capital, Tbilisi. Rights advocates worried that the bill would stoke more violence.

Zourabichvili has long been at odds with the ruling party, and vetoed the “foreign influence” law adopted by the parliament earlier this year. She was overridden by the parliament, where Georgian Dream dominates.

The measure requires media and nongovernmental organizations to register as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power” if they receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad. It ignited weeks of protests and was widely criticized as threatening democratic freedoms. Those opposing the law compared it to similar legislation in Russia, where it is routinely used to suppress dissent, and accused the ruling party of acting in concert with Moscow, jeopardizing Georgia’s chances of joining the European Union.

The South Caucasus nation of 3.7 million formally applied to join in 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the bloc halted its accession in response to the “foreign influence” law and froze some of its financial support. The United States imposed sanctions on dozens of Georgian officials in response to the law.

Georgian Dream was set up by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a shadowy billionaire who made his fortune in Russia and served briefly as Georgia’s prime minister in 2012. It promised to restore civil rights and “reset” relations with Moscow, which fought a brief war with Georgia in 2008 over the breakaway province of South Ossetia. Russia then recognized the independence of South Ossetia and another breakaway Georgian province, Abkhazia, and established military bases there.

Many Georgians backed Ukraine as Kyiv battled Russia’s invasion in 2022. But the Georgian government abstained from joining sanctions against Moscow, barred dozens of Kremlin critics from entering the country, and accused the West of trying to drag Tbilisi into open conflict with Russia. The opposition has accused the ruling party of steering the country into Russia’s orbit at the detriment of its European aspirations.

The Associated Press