Mandatory Committees Support the Bill to Abolish Inspector’s Service
By Natalia Kochiashvili
Wednesday, December 29
On December 25, it became known that the deputies of the parliamentary majority had prepared a bill, according to which the position of State Inspector and the Office of the State Inspector will be abolished and a special Investigation Service and Personal Data Protection Service will be established instead. The legislative package was presented to the Parliamentary Bureau on December 28.
With the legislative changes initiated by the Georgian Dream MPs, the current staff of the Office of the Inspector will be dismissed from March 1, and labor contracts will be terminated. The bill also restricts their possibility of legal dispute. GD leaders assure that the staff will not be dismissed, but transferred.
The draft law on the state inspector prepared by the Georgian Dream was supported by the Procedural and Human Rights Committee in the first reading.
As Londa Toloraia said, she and the staff of the State Inspector's Service learned through the media that the Parliament of Georgia had initiated such a bill and the billing process was completely conspiratorial
“The time of the initiation of the bill and the process of its expedited consideration somehow coincided with the pre-New Year period of the absence of the vast majority of representatives of the international and diplomatic corps in Georgia and my personal inspector's decree. This makes me think that this is not accidental,” Toloraia announced on December 25.
Toloraia said that even though the service had encountered many obstacles - had and still has insufficient legal guarantees of independence and ineffective leverage of activities, insufficient financial and human resources, as well as the problem of cooperation from agencies, the service team, with conscientious work, was able to form an independent state agency and gain trust.
She stressed that the work of the service, 2 years after its launch, is positively assessed by both international and local organizations.
Londa Toloraia responds to the challenges facing the service, according to her, back in 2019, Agency submitted to Parliament a new law on international data protection following international standards, which has been pending for more than 2 years.
In 2021, they presented to Parliament a detailed and critical report on the activities of 2020, which, for the first time in history, was not heard by Parliament.
On December 24, 2021, they submitted a legislative proposal to the Parliament, the aim of which is to strengthen the institutional capacity of the Service and to eliminate obstacles in the process of investigating official crimes. Parliament has not expressed interest in this proposal either.
Instead of encouraging the Georgian Parliament to further strengthen its service, a very dangerous process of expedited abolition of service began.
The reason given for the abolition of the State Inspector's Service is that the combination of two functions in the Service - personal data protection and investigative function - causes conflicts of interest and poses a threat to data protection. It was also noted that this completes the recommendation issued by the non-governmental sector in 2018 to establish an independent investigative service.
The Parliament of Georgia did not see the problem of incompatibility of interests in 2018 and did not consider this recommendation of NGOs as a weighty argument. As Toloraia says it became relevant only today when the Office of the State Inspector was established as an independent state institution. According to her, the bill does not reflect any of the recommendations issued by international organizations, the non-governmental sector, and does not address any of the challenges mentioned in the 2020 report to the Parliament of Georgia.
The parliamentary opposition demanded suspension of the consideration of the draft law on the state inspector. Besides that, a total of 17 NGOs have called on the Georgian government to ‘stop attacks on independent institutions. They stressed the importance of the involvement of civil society and representatives of the Inspector's Service in the process of working on the bill, adding that it ‘demonstrates the government's intent to influence an independent institution.
US Ambassador to Georgia Kelly Degnan has stated that ‘there is no need to rush’ with adopting a bill proposing to replace the State Inspector's Service with two new agencies, calling on the Georgian parliament to slow down the process. She called the new initiative of replacing the State's Inspector’s Service with two agencies ‘concerning,’ adding that the ‘process of developing this law is really of the greatest concern.’
The Geneva Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights responded to a parliamentary bill to abolish the Office of the State Inspector.
"We are deeply concerned about the draft law on the abolition of the independent institution - the State Inspector's Office. The service has a key role to play in preventing torture and protecting privacy. We urge you to step back from this initiative and ensure the independence of the national human rights mechanisms," the UN office said in a statement posted on Twitter.
