MOSCOW, April 4. /TASS/. Laws restricting the activities of foreign agents are currently being enacted worldwide because no country wants foreign meddling in their internal affairs, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, commenting on the repeat submission of such a foreign agents bill to the Georgian parliament.
"We see the opposition’s rather sharp reaction to such plans. Yet, here, probably, there should be a more concerted effort to explain to them the absurdity of [attempts to] view it as a Russian[-oriented] project. The thing is that the first country to come up with a system for combatting foreign agents was the US. And, nowadays, practically all countries are fighting against those who are agents of foreign countries, receive money from or are influenced by foreign countries," he noted.
The Kremlin official noted that this is "essentially a global practice." "Not a single sovereign state wants any interference by other countries in its domestic policies. This is a normal practice," he pointed out.
On Wednesday, Mamuka Mdinaradze, executive secretary of the ruling Georgian Dream party, noted that the foreign agents bill is once again being submitted to parliament. This is occurring one year after a similar initiative triggered mass street protests in Tbilisi. According to Mdinaradze, the wording of the bill is the same as the draft submitted last year, except that the term "an agent of foreign influence" has been replaced with "an organization promoting the interests of a foreign power." Georgian Dream said that the decision to resubmit the bill was driven mainly by the fact that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) financed from abroad are still not disclosing their income sources even as they are frequently the main driving force behind political protests.