Riot police armed with water cannon and teargas have been accused of beating protesters who picketed outside Georgia’s parliament to try to stop a final vote on a controversial “foreign influence” law.
The fresh scenes of violence on Monday morning came as hundreds of masked officers charged down demonstrators who had been attempting to block off access to the parliament in the capital, Tbilisi.
Individual protesters were hauled away by officers and footage later shared on social media appeared to show two of those detained being kicked and punched by police.
The agency responsible for investigating allegations of police brutality, the Special Investigation Service, said later on Monday morning that it had opened a case into claims of use of excessive force.
The protesters have been seeking to stop a committee of MPs from signing off on a bill that would force non-governmental groups and media to register as “organisations serving the interest of a foreign power” if more than 20% of their funding comes from overseas.
Opponents of the bill, including the US state department, claim it is inspired by Russian legislation passed in 2012, which they say has been used to persecute critics of the Kremlin. The EU has warned that passing the legislation will damage Georgia’s chances of joining the bloc.
The demonstrators failed to keep MPs out of the parliamentary estate and the government-dominated committee passed the bill in 67 seconds at 9am. A final vote of the whole parliament will take place on Tuesday.
Georgia’s president, Salome Zourabichvili, who is opposed to the law, has the power to veto it but the governing Georgian Dream party has enough votes to overrule her in a vote.
The ministry of interior affairs said two US citizens and one Russian had been among 20 people arrested at the protest. “They violated public order, resisted and insulted law enforcement officers,” a spokesperson said.
The protest on Monday morning had been largely peaceful but there were outbreaks of violence when the riot police surged forward to isolate individuals, leading to plastic bottles being thrown at officers.
The crowd of about 2,000 people, many in their 20s, chanted “Russians, Russians, Russians” and “slaves, slaves, slaves”, and carried EU and Georgian flags. Many had been out for more than 24 hours, under constant drizzle.
Hundreds of thousands of people have joined protests in Tbilisi in recent months, claiming their government was seeking a closer relationship with Russia at the expense of its relations with the west.
Georgia, with a population of 3.7 million, joined countries trying to gain accession to the EU when it was granted official candidate status last December.
The government, which has been in power for 12 years, claims to be pro-EU but it has avoided placing sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine and critics claim it has been seeking to strengthen ties with the Kremlin.
The Dream party’s founder and honorary chair, Bidzina Ivanishvili, a former prime minister who made vast wealth in Russia, has recently repeated the conspiracy theory of a “global war party, which has a decisive influence on Nato and the European Union and which only sees Georgia and Ukraine as cannon fodder”.
Critics claim the foreign agents law is an attempt to stifle civil society in Georgia. A number of organisers of the protests against the proposed law have been targeted in recent days for brutal attacks at their homes or workplace by unidentified gangs.
Dimitri Chikovani, who was severely beaten by five men near his apartment building entrance in Tbilisi’s Sololaki district last Wednesday evening, said he had also received threatening phone calls.
Speaking to the Guardian after his release from hospital, Chikovani, who suffered fractured cheek bones and a broken nose, said he believed the government was behind the attacks.
He said: “The point is to make people fear them. But if I may add, it’s pointless and useless. Because people of Georgia, they have spoken, they have decided that the European way, the western civilisation, is the way of Georgia. Georgian Dream won’t stop it. We will protest until Georgian Dream stands back and stops the law.”
