“We gave a very clear message in January: please come back. Come back to a constructive dialogue with us and let’s go into the right direction together. But unfortunately, we have to say today the opposite happened. You have to imagine that they follow a little bit the model of other countries every day, putting a new strange law on the table to confuse each and everyone,” said Frank Schwabe, Chairman of the Social Democratic Group of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, in his speech at the PACE.

Schwabe claims that the Georgian government has deviated from democracy and human rights.

“I know that you do your very best to do everything to bring Georgia to a way of democracy, rule of law and human rights. And it’s really a pity to see that the current authorities went away from this way, they look like wanting to go, and we have to be clear and fair enough. There was some hope with Georgian Dream.

I can say it as a chair of the Socialists, Democrats and Greens Group, that they were members in our group and we tried to work together in a dialogue to better the situation. I thought at the beginning of the process of their government, I think you can feel it – but meanwhile they went in another direction.

Membership in the Council of Europe is a commitment for democracy, human rights and the rule of law. It’s not about geopolitics. Some of the Georgian politicians said to me, “ah, you want to decide in which way we should go?” For sure, I don’t like it if you are friends with war criminals, but if you want to be friends with Putin’s Russia, you can do it. But what you cannot do is to undermine the values and rules of this Organisation. You have to follow it. And if you change your country to a kind of model like Putin’s Russia, then we have a problem together. This is described in this report. And because of this, we gave a very clear message in January: please come back. Come back to a constructive dialogue with us and let’s go into the right direction together.

But unfortunately, we have to say today the opposite happened. You have to imagine that they follow a little bit the model of other countries every day, putting a new strange law on the table to confuse each and everyone. And this is what the Venice Commission put on the table. They criticised the new law for the local elections. We have a big criticism on the law to change the Central Election Commission. And I would like to say that we are in agreement with the Congress as well about these questions.

What was very strange is that the Secretary General of this Organisation tried to start a kind of dialogue. I was a little bit skeptical whether this would work. But at the end, Georgian authorities used hypocritical reasons to stop even this dialogue.

So please, Georgian authorities come back our way, please. I think you should go for new elections because you need a kind of new legitimisation. We saw the irregularities in the elections, and you should do everything to stop the violence and to release the political prisoners,” he stated.