Guest Post by Ted Jonas.
On April 30, 2024, just before midnight, I was grabbed from the midst of a massive pro-Europe, anti-Russian demonstration in downtown Tbilisi by a phalanx of masked Georgian police, dragged, beaten, and thrown into an unmarked van. After 30 years in the country, the news that “well-known lawyer” Ted Jonas had been beaten and arrested that night went viral across social media, and I gained my “15 minutes of fame” not from all the work I had done in Georgia over the preceding 30 years, but for being beaten up and arrested.
I was a victim of political violence in Georgia, but it is now clear that my first priority as a democracy advocate and a fighter for the rule of law must be the United States. Let me explain.
When I arrived in Georgia in 1994 to open the office of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a U.S. nonprofit that works on democracy building around the world, I felt well-qualified for my job. Not so much because of my own background — lawyer, congressional staffer, and law clerk to a federal appeals court judge — but because I came from the most successful liberal democracy in world history. We had just won the Cold War, our liberal democratic order had been vindicated for all to see, and our Constitution stood as an example of stability and longevity.
In contrast, Georgia has faced a difficult path in its democratic transition since gaining its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Under President Eduard Shevardnadze, it had adopted a constitution loosely based on the American model, enacted civil and commercial legislation based on American and German templates, made the first major effort at court reform, began integrating its armed forces into U.S. military programs, and tied itself to the West with large, cross-border oil and gas projects. But the government was corrupt, the population was shivering in the dark without gas for heat or electricity for light, and its infrastructure was crumbling. The 2003 Rose Revolution changed all that. Mikheil Saakashvili brought in a smart, young team and built a functioning administrative state. Petty corruption disappeared, gas and electricity worked, roads and bridges were built. The economy boomed.
The so-called “Georgian Dream” government of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili defeated the Saakashvili government in elections in 2012, largely on the strength of voter discontent over gross abuses of power. Saakashvili had made the courts mere instruments of the state, administrative organs responded to political instructions, and the state rapaciously prosecuted individuals and businesses on trumped up charges to extort money. The Georgian Dream government initially sought to end the human rights abuses of the Saakashvili government, while maintaining its trajectory towards the West. Its accommodations towards Russia became concerning early on, but overall it remained committed to EU and NATO membership, working on the accession processes for both organizations. Georgia achieved EU candidate status in December 2023.
And yet, only four months later, Ivanishvili made a rare public speech blaming the “Global War Party” for the war in Ukraine, and explicitly burning Georgia’s bridges with the West. After stolen parliamentary elections in October 2024 tightened the Georgian Dream’s grip on power, Ivanishvili’s hand-picked Prime Minister announced Georgia was postponing any efforts to join the EU, the mass demonstrations started again, so too did the beatings and arrests, and it all continues to this day. Hundreds of Georgians have been beaten, arrested, convicted, and jailed on charges based on new, authoritarian anti-free speech and assembly laws, and dozens remain in jail as political prisoners
As someone who was beaten and arrested by masked, anonymous figures acting as Georgian police forces at one of these demonstrations, I am personally fascinated by the similarities and contrasts between the practices of U.S. federal and Georgian “police” agents. Both U.S. federal agents and Georgian riot police of various stripes are masked and do not display their names or identification numbers on their uniforms. But Georgian police can beat you up and arrest you just for “insulting” them. Before they grabbed me, I had been yelling “Russians,” “traitors,” and “slaves” at a group of them standing about 30 meters away from me. That was upheld by the Georgian court that convicted me of “petty hooliganism” as insulting language justifying my arrest, and the court did not accept my argument that it was political speech protected under the Georgian Constitution. In contrast, you can pretty much yell anything except a direct threat of violence at a US federal agent, including the worst curse words. At the same time, U.S. federal agents are far more heavily armed than Georgian riot police, most of whom do not carry lethal weapons (they mainly stick to tear gas, truncheons, rubber bullets, and water cannons). Although there are more cases of badly beaten and hospitalized protestors coming out of Georgia than in the United States, the recent despicable killings of two protesters in Minneapolis demonstrate the extent which U.S. agents will go.
In at least one important respect — the courts — the American liberal order is standing far stronger than in Georgia. The Georgian courts are fully captive to the executive branch, rubber stamping the charges, arguments, and “evidence” of the prosecutor and the police without any independent examination of the case. In my own trial for “petty hooliganism” in Tbilisi, we proved with documents and photographic, time and date stamped evidence that the police falsified arrest documents and committed perjury in the court. The judge ignored all that evidence, including in her written decision. U.S. district courts, in contrast, are issuing repeated rulings against federal police tactics against demonstrators and in their pursuit of alleged “illegal” immigrants. The appellate and Supreme courts of the United States, however, are illustrating far less political independence.
In over 30 years of living and working in Georgia, I have lost all arrogance about the superiority of democracy and rule of law in my homeland, the United States. We are now subject in the USA to authoritarianism, governmental chaos, contested elections, unlawful conduct by federal officers from the President on down, and police violence that equals and even in some cases surpasses that of Georgia, the country to which I came as a proud American to help build the rule of law in 1994.
But I still have greater confidence for the immediate future of democracy in the United States than in Georgia for three reasons: First, a strong political opposition may yet — if we can defend the integrity of the 2026 Midterm elections — succeed in limiting and ultimately ending the growing authoritarianism of the Trump regime. Georgia presently holds minimal prospects for a change in government due to the imprisonment of political opposition leaders, and the complete monopoly on all institutions of government held by the ruling party. Second, the survival, for now, of our independent state and federal court systems in the United States. And third, the strength of our federal system. States like California, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, New York, and Oregon are pushing back, although they can do a lot more.
Nevertheless, we are now witnessing unprecedented assaults on democracy in America. If the United States falls as a democratic republic based on rule of law, democracy will fail elsewhere in the world too, and will be unrecoverable where it has already failed, as in Georgia. So reclaiming democracy and rule of law in the United States is the first order of business for me now, in what is a global struggle for human rights, justice and freedom.
Ted Jonas is a U.S. trained and educated lawyer licensed in Washington, D.C. and the State of Georgia. He has over 40 years’ experience in legal, legislative, and judicial work in the private, public and nonprofit sectors. He is a dual U.S.-Georgian citizen and has lived and worked in Georgia for over 30 years.
Photo by Shamil Shugaev
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