From Georgia to Serbia, Surveillance is Being Weaponised Against Dissent
From Georgia to Serbia, Surveillance is Being Weaponised Against Dissent
From Georgia to Serbia, Surveillance is Being Weaponised Against Dissent
lmost every evening since November 2024, Giorgi Chanturia has walked from the headquarters of Georgia’s public broadcaster to the parliament, megaphone in hand. It’s a walk that is proving extremely expensive.
Chanturia, 36, is one of thousands of Georgians who have taken to the streets almost daily since the government in the South Caucasus country suspended talks on joining the European Union after EU parliamentarians rejected the results of Georgia’s October 2024 general election, won by the ruling Georgian Dream.
Police responded with tear gas, water cannon and pepper spray; more than 400 people were detained, but the protests continued, demanding new elections and the release of political prisoners.
The authorities didn’t respond only with force, however. They deployed ‘Big Brother’ too, in the form of 30 Chinese-made cameras equipped with facial recognition software, bought in December 2024 for roughly 85,000 lari, or 27,000 euros. Besides recognising faces, the cameras can also discern gender and age, analyse emotions from facial expressions, and upload high-resolution photographs.
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Chanturia has received 74 fines since February 2025, totalling 370,000 lari, or some 115,000 euros. He says he has no intention of paying.
“They might pause for a while and then suddenly 14 new fines arrive all at once, from the last two weeks,” Chanturia told BIRN. “We’d take those 14 fines and appeal against them in court, just to delay payment for as long as possible.”
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High-resolution surveillance systems capable of ‘remote biometric identification’, or RBI, “make it far easier for authorities to identify protesters, track activists, and therefore pressure any dissenting voices”, said Aljosa Ajanovic Andelic, a policy adviser at European Digital Rights, EDRi, a network of NGOs, experts, advocates and academics promoting digital rights in Europe.
While acknowledging the “legitimate fear” over the security of data collected by cameras procured from companies linked to authoritarian regimes such as China, Ajanovic Andelic said the fundamental risks remains “how Georgian and Serbian authorities use this infrastructure” – how the data is collected, how long it is stored for, whether biometric profiles are created, and who ultimately has access.
“Once a government installs infrastructure capable of tracking every face in public space, human-rights abuses become almost impossible to prevent, and the balance of power shifts decisively away from the public towards the authorities,” he said.
Like Georgia, Serbia under the Progressive Party and President Aleksandar Vucic has drifted from the path of EU accession; reforms have slowed almost to a halt, while Vucic has bristled at criticism of his handling of the protests and a general trend of democratic backsliding. Serbia also continues to reject EU pressure to join sanctions on Russia, its veto-wielding ally in the United Nations Security Council, while deepening its relationship with China in terms of surveillance technology and major infrastructure projects.
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Slovenian MEP Irena Joveva said that in both Georgia and Serbia, “the more autocratic regimes feel threatened by their people, the more repression is unleashed against peaceful protests”.
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[Edri expert] Ajanovic Andelic said that when governments buy RBI-capable surveillance systems “from vendors with a track record of enabling repression elsewhere, with ties to authoritarian governments that might have access to their collected data, and then operate them without transparency at home, the result is a perfect recipe for human rights violations”.
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