The campaign This Affects You would like to respond to the wiretapped recording of a phone conversation between the director of Rustavi 2 and a political party leader that has recently found its way into mainstream and social media.
The campaign member non-governmental organizations are outraged by this most recent incident of secretly recorded phone conversation. The campaign calls on the government to take concrete steps to combat illegal surveillance and wiretapping.
Secret surveillance and wiretapping has been a systemic problem for years. To this day, the government has failed to effectively investigate these crimes, and to fundamentally reform existing legislation on surveillance, in order to ensure the right to privacy of each citizen.
We would like to once again remind the government that on April 14, 2016, the Constitutional Court fully granted our claim and declared the existing system of secret surveillance and wiretapping to be unconstitutional. Specifically, the Court declared unconstitutional the so-called “two key” system, through which security agencies have direct access to phone conversations, and the State Security Service has, without court permission, direct access to internet communication, user identity, location, device used and the right to store this information for two years.
The Georgian Parliament has yet to take necessary steps to execute the decision of the Constitutional Court. The campaign This Affects You has already prepared a package of legislative amendments that fully reflects the spirit of the Constitutional Court decision and is the only real alternative to the existing unconstitutional model. Unfortunately, the current Parliament has failed to even initiate the draft law.
We call on the government to:
