The State of LGBTQ+ Rights in Georgia in 2026: A Community Pushed Underground

Tbilisi Pride hasn’t organized a public march since 2023. Its office has been vandalized three times. Its longtime director now lives in Brussels with political refugee status, having concluded that if the Georgian government ever decided to seriously enforce its own laws, she and her organization would be among the first targets. That’s the shorthand version of where LGBTQ+ rights in Georgia stand in 2026 — not a single dramatic event, but a slow, deliberate dismantling that’s left one of the Caucasus’s more visible queer communities operating almost entirely out of sight.

The law that changed everything

The turning point was the Law on Family Values and Protection of Minors, passed by Georgia’s parliament on September 17, 2024, and signed into force on October 3 after President Salome Zurabishvili refused to sign it and sent it back without comment — a gesture that delayed nothing, since the ruling Georgian Dream party had the votes to override her. The party passed the bill 84–0, in a vote the opposition boycotted.

The law reads like a checklist of everything anti-LGBTQ+ legislation elsewhere in the region has tried, consolidated into one package covering 18 existing statutes. It gives authorities legal grounds to ban Pride marches and public display of the rainbow flag. It bans gender-transition care outright. It prohibits adoption by LGBTQ+ people and same-sex couples. It nullifies same-sex marriages performed abroad if either partner tries to have them recognized on Georgian soil. It restricts media and education content that so much as depicts LGBTQ+ relationships. Human rights researchers and Georgian civil society groups have drawn a direct line between the bill’s language and Russia’s own “LGBT propaganda” laws, and UN experts formally called on Tbilisi to repeal it, citing violations of Georgia’s international human rights obligations. The government hasn’t moved.

What it did to the community on the ground

Tbilisi Pride, which had organized marches and public events since 2019, closed its physical offices and let its staff go in May 2025, citing sustained intimidation that made continuing to operate under its own name untenable. Tamar Jakeli, who directed the organization, left for Brussels with her partner and their two children. She’s since been granted political refugee status. Her reasoning, as she’s described it, was blunt: if the government began seriously enforcing the family values law’s provisions, Tbilisi Pride would be one of the first five or ten organizations it came for.

That’s not a hypothetical thrown around lightly by someone new to Georgian LGBTQ+ organizing. The 2021 attempt to hold a Pride march in Tbilisi ended in a mob of counter-protesters, some organized by far-right and church-affiliated groups, storming the parade route and the offices of civil society organizations, sending journalists and organizers to the hospital. In 2023, a similar attempt to hold Pride events was cancelled after another wave of threats. The 2024 law simply gave the state the legal architecture to make what mobs had already been doing informally into official policy.

Legal protections have narrowed too. An April 2025 amendment to Georgia’s Penal Code removed gender identity as a protected characteristic in hate crime statutes, leaving only sexual orientation on the books — a rollback that trans Georgians say has made prosecuting violence against them meaningfully harder, since prosecutors and police now have to fit an attack into a narrower legal box to treat it as a bias crime at all.

What remains of public queer life in Tbilisi is small and concentrated. Vashlovani Street in the city center hosts what are functionally the only two openly LGBTQ+ venues left, Success — open since 2002, one of the older gay bars anywhere in the former Soviet space — and Mozaika, which opened in 2016. Both operate without incident most nights, but neither advertises loudly, and neither has hosted anything resembling a public Pride event in years.

The EU accession contradiction

The bitter irony sitting underneath all of this is that Georgia has spent years pursuing European Union candidate status, a process that nominally requires exactly the kind of rights protections the 2024 law strips away. Georgian Dream has continued to describe EU membership as a national goal even while passing legislation that runs directly counter to the EU’s own human rights benchmarks — the same tension that’s played out, with different outcomes, across several Western Balkan candidate countries where accession pressure has occasionally forced governments to walk back anti-LGBTQ+ measures they’d rather have kept. In Georgia, so far, accession rhetoric hasn’t translated into accession-driven reform. Brussels has criticized the family values law and the broader “foreign agents” legislation Georgian Dream passed the same year, but neither criticism nor Georgia’s own candidate-country obligations have produced a repeal.

For LGBTQ+ Georgians weighing whether to stay, that gap between what the government says it wants (EU membership) and what it’s actually built (a legal framework that pushes queer life further underground every year) has become its own kind of answer. Some, like Jakeli, have left. Others are staying and organizing quietly, in private spaces, waiting to see whether international pressure or a change in government produces movement that four years of protest so far haven’t.