‘The whole country will strike’: protesters vow to keep fighting Georgia’s ‘foreign agents’ bill

As the draft law described by the US as ‘Kremlin-inspired’ nears final vote, opposition and youth groups said they would keep defending civil liberties

As the “foreign influence” bill was being nodded through the Georgian parliament’s legal committee at 9am on Monday, a wet and tired Zviad Tsetskhladze, 18, and Luka Natsvlishvili, 17, were among thousands of protesters left with little option other than to shout chants at a grim wall of riot police.

An overnight vigil designed to block the governing party’s MPs from accessing the parliamentary estate had failed. Meanwhile, the opposition leader in the parliament, Tina Bokuchava, 40, had barely made it past the entrance of the imposing stone building. Her colleagues on the committee only got as far as the corridor outside.