We the Georgian civil society representatives, civic activists and media representatives, would like to draw your attention to the upcoming 2020 parliamentary elections in Georgia and continued attempts of political interest groups and foreign actors to undermine free and equal election environment by using disinformation and Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) on Facebook, jeopardizing democracy and Georgia’s Western integration.

The undersigned organizations would like to respond to the statement of H.E. Hubert Knirsch, the Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to Georgia, posted on the embassy’s official Facebook page on June 25. The statement was in response to the Georgian NGOs’ critical assessment of Ms. Sopio Kiladze’s nomination for the membership to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Ms. Kiladze is the member of the Parliament of Georgia.

In the second half of 2020, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child  (CRC) will elect  nine new members at the eighteen session (Conference of States Parties to the Convention). The States Parties shall select and nominate candidates to the Committee in an open and transparent manner. Georgia has nominated Sophie Kiladze, Chair of the Human Rights and Civil Integration Committee of the Parliament of Georgia, as a candidate for the CRC membership. 

May 17 is the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia (IDAHOT). In Georgia, this day has become a day of gathering and manifestation of LGBTQ people in public space and it has been one of the clearest examples of manifestation of the state homophobia from year to year. The severity of the daily lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer people and the neglect of the real needs of community members by the state became even more apparent in 2020, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Civil Platform “No to Phobia!” expresses its concern about the comments containing hate speech on the ground of ethnicity made by Zaza (Zaal) Abashidze, the Director of LEPL National Center of Manuscripts, in the social media.