The Georgian Parliament is to discuss adopting a Patriot Act, which its authors say curbs the terrorist threat to Georgia. Opponents say that the act does not include any “seriously new” measures.

The Patriot Act was proposed to the Parliament of Georgia on Tuesday, November 17, by Gia Tortladze, member of the Parliament’s Unified Opposition faction and chairman of Strong Georgia. “We have an entire bouquet of terrorist acts in Georgia: kidnappings, explosions and sabotage, all of it, that’s why I think it is time for us to pass such an act,” Tortladze said. He cited explosions on the railroad and the kidnappings of more than 100 people, including the latest case of four Georgian teenagers being held in Tskhinvali, as instances which require Georgia to develop its own anti-terrorist legislation.

The Patriot Act’s provisions focus on checking shipments entering Georgia and recording information about people coming into the country. The act includes measures for border monitoring and the surveillance of important buildings and infrastructure including the railways, airports, sea ports, metro stations, ‘strategic’ bridges, electricity stations, and public places. The bill also calls for the monitoring of significant monetary transfers by the banks. “We must establish as much monitoring as possible so that terrorist acts do not occur in Georgia,” Tortladze said.

The Patriot Act has been modelled not only on its American counterpart but also the anti-terrorist legislation of France, Germany, the U.K. and Spain, Tortladze said. The U.S. Patriot Act allows phone surveillance, e-mail surveillance and property searches without the owners’ knowledge, some of the act’s most controversial provisions. However, “we have erased these three measures from our act,” Tortladze said.

Levan Vephkhvadze, Deputy Chairman of Parliament and member of the Christian Democrat faction, said that his party had previously believed that a Patriot Act could give the authorities a tool with which to pressurise the opposition. The Christian Democrats initially opposed the act because it could potentially allow the Government to use special services to clamp down on dissent. “The problem is that we, unfortunately, do not have special services that are politically neutral,” Vephkhvadze said in an interview to The Georgian Times prior to the act’s introduction to Parliament. “Our special services are very politicised, and the problem is that they are working for one political group [the Government].”

However, the only instance where special services are mentioned in the Patriot Act is a provision concerning information exchange and coordination between Georgia’s law-enforcement agencies, Tortladze said. When members of the Christian Democratic Movement looked through the act, many of their previous concerns were relieved, Vephkhvadze said. “The problem was partially resolved because the measures present in the American act were not seen in our act,” Vephkhvadze said.

The issue of concern now is whether the act offers enough new measures to protect Georgia from terrorism. “In principle, some of the measures have already existed,” Vephkhvadze said. For example, the law against the legalisation of criminal funds stipulates that the National Bank can monitor monetary transfers equal or greater than 25,000 GEL. The proposed Patriot Act decreases this sum to 10,000 GEL, “but in principle the measures are quite the same, that’s why we do not think that there is anything seriously new in this legislative proposal,” Vephkhvadze said. Additionally, the bill allows the Interior Ministry to open and search ‘suspicious cargo’ moving through Georgia together with customs officials. But a customs inspector who spoke on condition of anonymity said that they are already exercising this power.

Tortladze said he believed that the Patriot Act would pass through Parliament “because this act is not for me or some party or some movement, this act is needed by Georgia.” The Christian Democrats have yet to formulate their official stance on the bill. Vephkhvadze said that the party has submitted the act to its experts and plans to decide on its official position after hearing back from them.

The American version of such anti-terrorist legislation, the USA PATRIOT Act, was signed into law by President George W. Bush in October 2001, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The acronym in the name of the act stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. The law is commonly known as the Patriot Act. With numerous provisions, many of which continue to cause controversy in the United States, the act increased the ability of law enforcement and Government agencies to search telephone and e-mail communications, medical, financial, library and other records; to regulate financial transactions and to detain and deport immigrants suspected of freelance terrorism. The act also expanded the definition of terrorism to include domestic terrorism, thus further increasing the jurisdiction of the law enforcement agencies, whose power has been expanded by the act. The general US public are still unaware of many of the act’s provisions due to the act’s lengthy character and the great number of amendments made to it.

The U.S. Congress is now reviewing key provisions of the original Patriot Act with December 31, 2009, being the deadline for the act’s extension. As reported by The Hill, the leading U.S. newspaper about Congress, the Obama administration is “standing firm” in its support of several Patriot Act powers while facing sharp criticism from civil rights groups and liberal Democrats. The sections which need to be renewed are those revolving around the use of National Security Letters (NSL), written demands by the FBI compelling credit companies, financial institutions, libraries, internet service providers and other institutions to surrender confidential information about their customers, and a never-used authority to spy on non-Americans suspected of being freelance terrorists, a part of the so-called “lone wolf” provisions.

Prior to the Patriot Act’s introduction in the Parliament of Georgia, the Christian Democrats expressed concerns that it might be a close relative of its American counterpart. However unlike the U.S. version, which numbers 342 pages without amendments, Tortladze’s bill is 5 pages long. Its sufficiency in combating terrorism has replaced its potential threat to civil liberty as the main focus of discussion.