Georgia’s president has refused to sign into law a bill aimed at severely curtailing LGBTQ+ rights, weeks after the controversial legislation was passed by the country’s parliament.
Last month Georgia’s parliament was heavily criticised after it approved the legislation, which sets out sweeping bans on same-sex marriages, adoptions by same-sex couples and curbs on gender-affirming treatments.
The law, which mirrors legislation adopted in neighbouring Russia, also seeks to outlaw Pride events and censor depictions of LGBTQ+ people in film and books.
On Wednesday, the office of the president, Salome Zourabichvili, said she had opted against advancing the legislation. “President Zourabichvili refused to sign the bill and returned to parliament without vetoing it,” her spokesperson told AFP. The bill is instead expected to be signed into law by the parliament’s speaker.
The legislation has fuelled tensions in the polarised country, where parliamentary elections are to be held at the end of the month. Analysts have described the ballot as a crucial test of whether Georgia, once one of the most pro-western former Soviet states, is drifting towards Russia.
Rights campaigners argue that the “family values” bill will further marginalise and potentially fuel violence against the country’s vulnerable LGBTQ+ community. The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, attacked the vote, which opposition politicians boycotted. Borrell said on social media that the bill would “increase discrimination and stigmatisation”.
One day after the bill was passed in parliament, the well-known transgender actor and model Kesaria Abramidze, 37, was found stabbed to death in her apartment.
Campaigners cast her death as part of a rise in violence against LGBTQ+ people, dovetailing with the ruling Georgian Dream party’s hardening stance on gay rights.
“There is a direct correlation between the use of hate speech in politics and hate crimes,” the Social Justice Center, a Tbilisi-based human rights group, said in a statement reacting to the murder.
Last year hundreds of opponents of gay rights stormed an LGBTQ+ festival in Tbilisi, forcing the event to be cancelled, while in May tens of thousands joined members of the ruling party in a march, organised by the conservative Orthodox church, to promote “traditional family values”.
In recent years the country’s president has increasingly been at odds with Georgian Dream. Earlier this year Zourabichvili vetoed the “foreign influence” law, which obliged civil society organisations and media that receive more than 20% of their revenues from abroad to register as “serving the interests of a foreign power”.
Her veto was later overridden by parliament, where Georgian Dream dominates.
