Ultraconservative forces in the United States no longer have a friend in the White House, but their efforts to undermine democracy and human rights in Europe have maintained momentum, in partnership with like-minded wealthy European and Russian religious ideologues.
Rights defenders tasked with defending Europe’s values say the strategy and tactics of international illiberalism are just beginning to be understood.
They have identified a powerful international network of ultraconservative groups backed by a cast of wealthy American, European and Russian financiers working within the European Union and countries on its eastern fringe, including Georgia in the South Caucasus.
In Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, far-right violence exploded on the streets last year, leading to dozens of people being hurt.Members of Georgia’s LGBTQ community had promised to hold a “March of Dignity” on July 5, but had been warned by the authorities that the police would not be able to guarantee their protection.
Alt-Info, one of Georgia’s most vocal far-right organisations, called for a counterrally in central Tbilisi.
When a crowd gathered outside the country’s parliament, Alt-Info’s Zurab Makharadze urged them: “If necessary, we will shed blood and make these f*ggots’ mothers weep.”
Protesters were directed to go in search of LGBTQ activists, but they then turned on journalists, many of whom were working for liberal and opposition media.At least 53 people were injured (PDF), including cameraman Aleksandre Lashkarava who suffered fractures to his skull and a concussion.
Lashkarava’s colleague claimed the assault lasted 20 minutes. He died a week later from what the authorities claimed was a heroin overdose. That is disputed by his family.
In any case, as their supporters tore down the flag of the EU and bolted a massive iron cross to the steps of the country’s parliament, the organisers, who had not shrunk from calling for outright violence, had a stark underlying message: Georgian Orthodox Christian values are incompatible with European democracy and human rights.
The Alt-Info leadership stood side by side with priests from Georgia’s Orthodox Church. But they also shared the stage with a poster of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary, where anti-LGBTQ legislation has been introduced.
While Georgia’s far-right experience has its own distinctive national characteristics, its international associations are also clear.
Nino Gozalishvili, who studies the far right in Georgia, told Al Jazeera that active groups such as Alt-Info, Georgian March, and Georgian Idea have always proudly associated themselves with their European and North American counterparts.
“Their social media pages are loaded with references to and examples from the politics of leaders such as Orbán, [former US President Donald] Trump, or [Poland’s governing party leader Jaroslaw] Kaczyński, adopting or echoing the language, political style, and at times even the protest content from the more successful European and North American cases,” she said.
But the transnational dimension runs deeper than being merely an identification with far-right politicians in Europe and the US.
Georgian groups are being nurtured within, and are drawing inspiration from, an international ultraconservative network of advocacy groups.
A formative moment came back in 2016, when Tbilisi hosted the World Congress of Families, an umbrella network promoting anti-abortion and anti-gay policies.
Levan Vasadze, a leading Georgian businessman and far-right campaigner, played host.
“The West de facto lost Georgia when it attacked our traditional society roots and cultural fabric,” he said in his keynote address, while the goal of Western-sponsored NGOs was to “mock and demonise traditional family values”.At the event, Georgian religious conservatives mingled with leading Russian and US advocates, including Alexey Komov who works for the St Basil Foundation headed by a far-right Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch, Konstantin Malofeev, and Douglas Napier from one of the US’s most powerful Christian Right legal advocacy groups, the Alliance for Defending Freedom (ADF).
US rights watchdog the Southern Poverty Law Center lists the ADF as a hate group.
Overlapping group of actors
Regular forums and conferences are attended by directors and associates of different US, European and Russian conservative and far-right organisations, some of whom are members of each other’s boards.
“You have the same overlapping group of actors present at international and at European level also in the US and other parts of the world,” Neil Datta, the secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF), told media.
The EPF, a network of pro-rights European parliamentarians, claims Christian religious extremists from the US, Russia and Europe have been working to roll back human rights in Europe since 2013 through a coordinating platform known as Agenda Europe (PDF).
Their “anti-gender movement” focuses its attacks on five interrelated sets:
- Sexual and reproductive health and rights including abortion, contraception, divorce and assisted reproduction
- LGBTQ rights
- The definition of gender as a non-biological, cultural construct
- Children’s rights and the state’s authority to determine the welfare of a child over parents
- Elevating religious freedom to be a higher order of human rights than others such as the right to abortion and sexual orientation
“These themes come under attack depending on the circumstances and cultural preferences of a given country,” Datta said. “Then you have local actors nationally who are the ones who run with it when the moment is right.”
If LGBTQ rights are the target in Georgia, in other countries, the anti-gender movement has zeroed in on sexual and reproductive health, and the groundbreaking European legal instrument known as the Istanbul Convention.Established by Europe’s leading human rights organisation, the Council of Europe, the Istanbul Convention sets legally-binding standards to fight gender-based violence, in particular violence against women.
In Strasbourg, Brussels and other European capitals, the ADF’s international arm – the ADFI – is fighting to curtail rights legislation protecting women and the LGBTQ community.