The Georgian government drove the country toward a human rights crisis in 2024, Human Rights Watch said in its World Report 2025.
According to the document, the government has adopted new repressive laws, unleashed brutal police violence against mostly peaceful protesters, and pivoted away from the European Union accession process and the human rights reforms it would have required.
“The government is relentlessly taking the country into a repressive era that is uncharted for Georgia but all too familiar in authoritarian states,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia Director at Human Rights Watch. “But it is never too late for it to reverse course, drop repressive laws, allow freedom of assembly, stop violence against protesters, and hold police accountable.”
The government abandoned Georgia’s EU accession process one month after the disputed October 26 parliamentary elections that kept the country’s ruling party in power, which local observers and Georgia’s president contended were marred by massive vote rigging. The decision was made in spite of Georgia’s Constitution, which enshrines full EU integration as a goal for the state, and the desire of some 80 percent of the population for EU membership, prompting weeks of nationwide protests", - the document reads.
