“The street where the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, who also serves as Finland’s Foreign Minister, is standing is the capital city’s main thoroughfare. What you are seeing is a few dozen radicals—who stormed the Presidential Palace just a few days ago, injuring 25 police officers, two of them seriously—blocking the road in violation of the law,” said Shalva Papuashvili, Speaker of the Parliament of Georgia, responding to Finnish FM Elina Valtonen’s attendance at a rally on Rustaveli Avenue on Tuesday evening.
Ppuashvili claimed that Georgian law—like that of any OSCE member state—guarantees the right to free assembly anywhere. However, he emphasized that roadblocks are only justified when the number of protesters is too large to fit on the sidewalk.
“The Finnish minister may not be aware of this, but she would not be able to cite a single case in the past 13 years when this right was violated by the Georgian state.
Right behind the minister is the square in front of the Parliament building, where a crowd ten times larger than those few dozen blocking the road—including the Finnish minister herself—could easily gather for a peaceful assembly without obstructing traffic.
What the Finnish Minister and OSCE Chairperson is doing right there constitutes a violation of Georgian law. It also breaches Article 41 of the Vienna Convention—which, ironically, was adopted in the same city where the OSCE is headquartered.
By doing so, she is showing the Georgian people that she supports violent coup organizers and that the so-called rules-based international order is nothing but an empty phrase.
It also appears that Finnish authorities are far less tolerant of road-blocking protesters in Helsinki than in Tbilisi,” Papuashvili wrote on his X account.
Related story: Elina Valtonen: Georgian gov’t must find a way out of the crisis — freedom of expression and assembly are under question
