The Georgian Anti-Corruption Bureau has classified Transparency International Georgia and its head as entities ‘with a declared electoral goal’, ordering them to submit financial declarations to the Bureau within five days.

The decision on Tuesday also labelled Vote for Europe under the same classification. The group was created in July after the government passed the foreign agent law to mobilise Georgians to cast their votes on 26 October. They have been highly critical of the ruling party.

The decision came just hours after one of the co-founders of Vote for Europe, Iva Chkonia, joined the opposition Coalition for Change alliance.

Under this designation, the director of Transparency International Georgia, Eka Gigauri, and the eight co-founders of Vote for Europe, as well as its leader, Khatuna Lagazidze, will be subject to the stricter financial scrutiny and regulatory requirements applied to political groups. 

During a press conference on Tuesday, the chair of the Bureau, Razhden Kuprashvili, cited Chapter 3 of Georgia’s law ‘on political associations of citizens’, which subjects political organisations to financial scrutiny, explicitly referring to political parties or ‘electoral subjects’.

According to the head of the anti-corruption agency, the classification of a subject as having a political goal was not based on their declared intention to seek power but rather on their involvement in a campaign against another political party. He cited a recent Tbilisi City Court decision that allowed his office to interpret the law in this manner.

According to Article 32.3 of the same law, the Anti-Corruption Bureau is ‘obliged to provide information related to a party's annual financial declaration and the election campaign fund report to all interested persons and ensure that they are published on the relevant website within 5 working days of receiving it’.

At Tuesday’s press conference, Kuprashvili alleged that Transparency International Georgia and its director Gigauri were participating in the elections through the ‘My Vote for the EU’ campaign, allocating dedicated finances, human resources, and an online presence to ‘shape specific political attitudes in society’. Similarly, Kuprashvili claimed that Lagazidze and the board members of Vote for Europe had spent over ₾100,000 ($37,000) on activities that he said were aimed at achieving similar political objectives before the upcoming elections.

Transparency International Georgia promptly described the Bureau’s request as ‘lacking both factual and legal basis’ and claimed it was aimed at ‘persecuting an election observer group’.

Two other prominent local election watchdogs, the Georgian Young Lawyers' Association (GYLA) and the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), issued a joint statement condemning the Anti-Corruption Bureau's decision as 'unlawful'. 

They criticised the Bureau for citing ‘court practice’ to justify ignoring the prerequisite that requires a subject's declared intent to stand in elections in order to classify them as electoral subjects, and warned that such an ‘arbitrary’ interpretation by the Georgian courts and the Anti-Corruption Bureau ‘could become an instrument for restricting civil activism and curtailing freedom of expression’.

Both Kuprashvili and Gigauri have been outspoken critics of the Georgian Dream-led government, particularly for its lack of institutional reforms and anti-democratic actions, including the adoption of the foreign agent law in May. 

Gigauri appears to have particularly irked the government with her testimony before the US Senate earlier this month, where she addressed Georgia's increasing anti-democratic trend. Pro-government pundits immediately labelled her speech ‘treason’, while the Secretary-General of Georgian Dream,  Kakha Kaladze, called it ‘shameful’.

‘Gigauri, as such, is a representative of a non-governmental organisation, but in fact, she’s a regular politician’, Kaladze claimed. 

This is the second controversial action taken by Georgia's Anti-Corruption Bureau, following a similar decision to request the financial reports of Freedom Square and the Eastern European Centre for Multiparty Democracy.

[Read more: Georgia’s Anti-Corruption Bureau requests financial reports from Democracy Festival organisers]