I don’t think that any Embassy should combine the function of a court and indicate to the Georgian police what is legal and what is illegal. Such a statement made today the Chairman of the Parliament, while responding to the British Embassy.

“These Embassies have made such mistakes many times. These mistakes were made on June 20, 2019, then they said it was politicized justice, and despite our opposition, they bowed to us and wrote us into the April 19 agreement, insisting that there be an amnesty.

A few days ago we saw that it turned out to be an attack on the Parliament and it turned out to be a crime. Justice was also interfered with by the intervention of the embassies. We saw the same thing last year, during March and other rallies.

The Embassies are in a hurry for some reason, and they should think especially, since their sponsored NGOs are the participants of these violent actions and the ones who move the actions into the violent phase.

Remember who called from the stage to the participants of the peaceful protest to block the parliament, which is a violation of the law in itself. If this blockade is followed by contact with the police, and we saw that the representatives of the action turned to violence, was this predictable for the representatives of this NGO?

Well, they didn’t think it through the first time, did they know the next day that their call for such an action would be followed by violence from the representatives of the rally?

So, I call on these embassies and donors, instead of attacking the Georgian police and talking about illegal detention, which is an attack on the Georgian justice system and the Georgian police, to look at the videos, to recognize their anxieties in the participants of the protest, and to talk to them about why they turned peaceful protests into violence.

Donors will not escape responsibility. It is precisely their responsibility when their NGOs turn a peaceful protest into violence, because one - they act with their funding, and the other - if they call this protest peaceful, they encourage them to repeat the same actions. This is exactly what we had now, in these days - violent actions, which were called peaceful, and then they increased even more the next day, and the representatives of the action organized the storming of the parliament”, - said Shalva Papuashvili.

The Embassy of United Kingdom in Georgia issued a statement saying that “the UK calls on the Government of Georgia to take immediate measures to prevent illegal intimidation of people standing on the side of protest and to investigate all kinds of rights violations”.