In Georgia, a small country that borders Turkey and Russia, President Salome Zourabichvili she refused to sign the contested law to limit the rights of people from the LGBTQ+ community, definitively approved by parliament in mid-September, which therefore cannot come into force for the moment. The government, led by the Georgian Dream party, still has the votes in parliament to reject Zourabichvili’s veto, as happened at the end of May in the case of the so-called “foreign agents” law.
The law was presented in March by Sogno Georgiano, who has been in power since 2012, and provides among other things that the government can censor books and films and ban demonstrations such as Pride or the public display of rainbow flags, a symbol of LGBTQ+ community. The majority of Georgia’s population is conservative and the Georgian Orthodox Church is still very influential: for organizations that fight for the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, the law that limits their rights is an attempt by the government to increase its popularity in view of the parliamentary elections on 26 October, in which Georgian Dream is expected to obtain the highest number of votes.