The Committee discussed the Action Plan 2024 and the activities reflected therein.

According to the Chair, Irakli Beraia, the Plan provides the legal initiatives of the security and defense spheres, as well as the oversight functions and cooperation with the partner and international organizations. The Committee approved the Plan.

Pursuant to paragraph 9, Article 34 of the Rules of Procedure, the agenda, with the decision of the majority of the list composition of the Committee, was supplemented by the legal initiative on Enhancement of Parliamentary Oversight on Security Sector submitted by Transparency International-Georgia.

The proposal envisages the set-up of a specialized unit in the Parliament in view of the oversight of the security sector, its composition and mandate, as well as the admission to the state secrets and the mandate of the standing council of experts.

“The legal initiative includes the issues that contain factual inaccuracies and which we do not share. It is as well noteworthy that regarding the EU 9 recommendations, one of such directions envisages the enhancement of the oversight on the security sector and our European partners provide quite an effective estimation of this mechanism in their documents; the documents also clearly stipulate that the oversight mechanisms on the defense and security sector at the legal level is well organized and they mention only the practical part of these regulations and the engagement of the opposition within the Trust Group format. I would like to once again call on the opposition representatives within the Trust Group format to get back and attend the meetings, and one remaining vacant position shall be occupied by the opposition political groups pursuant to the Rules of Procedure”.

According to him, TI speaks a lot about the extension of other mandates, and gaps in other organizations while when it was up to its own transparency, the hereof organization drastically opposed it, and the legal initiative developed by our Majority MPs was declared as a Russian law.

As he noted, the legal initiative is not interesting for the Majority MPs and hence, will not be shared.

The opposition MPs protested the expedited consideration of the legal initiative and asked for the postponement in view of its scrutiny. In response to their request, the elucidations were made that the hereof initiative was been submitted to the Parliament in December 2023 with the term of 2 months for MPs to get cognizant of it.

The Committee declined the initiative of TI-Georgia.