"The police are brutal' Defiance in Tbilisi despite progress of 'foreign influence' law

As the "foreign influence" bill was being nodded through the Georgian parliament's legal committee at 9am yesterday, a wet and tired Zviad Tsetskhladze, 18, and Luka Natsvlishvili, 17, were among thousands of protesters left with little option other than to shout chants at a grim wall of riot police.

- Daniel Boffey

An overnight vigil designed to block the governing party's MPs from accessing the parliamentary estate had failed. Meanwhile, the opposition leader in the parliament, Tina Bokuchava, 40, had barely made it past the entrance of the imposing stone building. Her colleagues on the committee only got as far as the corridor outside.

In the end, it took just 67 seconds for the new law to be approved, after a path through the protest for MPs from the governing party, Georgian Dream, was made by ranks of masked police officers bristling with teargas canisters.

A final vote of the parliament will be held today, which is also expected to be a simple affair. The governing party has the votes. The expected veto of the antigovernment president, Salome Zourabichvili, can be overruled by a parliamentary majority.

There appears to be little to stop the progress of a bill that, if passed, will oblige media or civil society groups in Georgia that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register themselves as "organisations serving the interests of a foreign power".