Zviad Mchedlishvili is a Current Time correspondent in Tbilisi, Georgia.
The Georgian government is introducing new measures from September as it tries to boost the number of people vaccinated against COVID-19. People will now need to have a negative COVID test to enter restaurants, gyms, and beauty parlors if they haven't been vaccinated.
Georgian police on July 6 detained over 100 individuals for attempting to disrupt an anti-violence rally in Tbilisi intended as a response to nationalists' and ultraconservatives' disruption of a July 5 march for LGBT rights.
With unemployment in Georgia now at around 20 percent of the country’s workforce, Current Time’s Zviad Mchedlishvili spoke with Georgian jobseekers about why they are opting to go abroad to work during the coronavirus pandemic.
Unlike in nearby Armenia and Azerbaijan, ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the Georgian village of Khojorni have long lived together in peace. That history is part of the reason why Georgia, which contains several such villages, has offered to mediate in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Georgian cancer patients appear to be regularly traveling to the European Union to claim asylum on humanitarian grounds – a measure allowed under EU migration law. Though Georgia boasts the region’s highest number of doctors (51 per 10,000 people, according to the World Health Organization) and has modernized its hospitals in recent years, these patients say they cannot find the help they need.
Georgia’s governments have repeatedly declared war on poverty, but in the 300-person village of Davitiani, like in other villages in this would-be European Union member, a lack of income and lack of infrastructure remain daunting problems. To get officials’ attention, Davitiani, a predominantly ethnic Russian settlement located in the eastern vineyard region of Kakheti, is now considering an unusual option: a boycott of Georgia’s October 2020 parliamentary elections.
