Tamar Kordzaia

Tamar Kordzaia (Georgian: თამარ კორძაია; born in Sokhumi on 18 July 1977) is a Georgian civic activist and politician who has served as a Member of the Parliament of Georgia in 2013–2016 and since 2020.

She is known for her affiliation with liberal values and has been rated as one of the legislature's most liberal members.

Tamar Kordzaia was born on 18 July 1977, in Sokhumi, at the time the capital of the Abkhaz ASSR.

At 16 years old, she fled Abkhazia with her family to escape the ethnic cleansing of Georgians in the region that followed the 1992–1993 War of Abkhazia, crossing by foot the Greater Caucasus mountains through Svaneti.

She would later recall: "I always remember that path – the freezing children, the wounded soldiers, the dead bodies on the road. I remember how people helped each other, how they helped each other in this chain of refugees."

An IDP born in Abkhazia, she fled during the 1993 ethnic cleansing of Georgians in the region and joined the legal team of the Georgian Young Lawyers Association, an organization on behalf of which she defended journalistic rights during the presidency of Mikheil Saakashvili.

Moving to Tbilisi as an IDP, she graduated in journalism from the Grigol Robakidze University in 1999.

In 2002, she joined the Georgian Young Lawyers' Association (GYLA), an influential civil society organization, as head of its Media Legal Protection Center, a legal team offering services to journalists facing challenges against public authorities.

As such, she became a vocal critique of the Mikheil Saakashvili presidency, regularly taking on his administration's discretionary spending, protection of corporate monopolies, increased secrecy laws and corruption in local governments.

In 2003, she received a master's degree in law from Sokhumi State University.

She launched in 2004 the Broadcasting Monitoring Group within GYLA, monitoring news radio and television channels and analyzing trends of biased coverage, and lobbied against a 2011 bill that increased advertisement allotments, calling the latter a violation of viewers' rights to consume information uninterruptedly.

Outspoken against violations of freedom of the press, she worked on more than 600 legal cases fielded against or by journalists.

In 2009, Kordzaia fielded a lawsuit on behalf of GYLA requiring the government to declassify its Enguri HPP management agreement with Russian company Inter RAO, though the Tbilisi Municipal Court dismissed the case.

That same year, she was one of seven candidates to be nominated by the Media Club, a journalistic union, for the Board of Trustees of the Georgian Public Broadcasting, though the Saakashvili administration rejected her candidacy.

Besides her activist and political careers, Kordzaia has also worked as a professor at the University of Georgia since 2010.

In 2011, she co-wrote a failed NGO-sponsored bill on media ownership transparency.

During a 2011 ownership dispute at Maestro TV, she served as a mediator between the conflicting parties.

In February 2012, Tamar Kordzaia launched the Charter of Journalistic Ethics of Georgia, a self-regulatory body uniting more than 200 journalists and observing a common ethnics code.

As its executive director, she drafted a package if legislative amendments to the Broadcasting Act that would eventually be adopted by the Georgian Dream government once it took power in October 2012.

Ahead of the 2012 parliamentary election, she launched "This Concerns You", an activist campaign aiming at showing the public effect of legislation.

An outspoken critique of his government, she joined politics in 2013 when she was nominated by Georgian Dream to run for the Nadzaladevi Parliamentary District.

Serving as a member of the ruling majority, she distinguished herself as an active MP pursuing liberal reforms, successfully sponsoring major amendments to the Liberty Charter in 2013 that banned Soviet and Nazi symbolism and the Anti-Discrimination Act of 2014.

In March 2013, she drafted a bill that provided legislative oversight over the GPB.

Tamar Kordzaia was nominated by Georgian Dream to run in the 2013 special parliamentary election in the Nadzaladevi District in Tbilisi to replace Tea Tsulukiani after her appointment as Minister of Justice.

In his nominating speech, Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili called her a "sophisticated and correct choice", a response to criticism that his new government lacked professional credentials.

She ran against Conservative Kakha Kukava and UNM's Papuna Davitaia (former State Minister for Diaspora Affairs), while independent Zurab Kadagidze dropped out to endorse her, and came out first with 39.5% of the vote.

As a member of Parliament, she served first as a member of the Rules Committee and then of the Legal Affairs Committee.

A member of the ruling majority, she became known as one of Parliament's most liberal members, co-sponsoring one of her first bills in November 2013, an amendment to the Liberty Charter that banned symbols of Soviet and fascist authoritarianism.

Kordzaia was rated by the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED) as "the third most active member of the 8th Parliament", sponsoring 22 bills, including the Anti-Discrimination Act of 2014 which passed despite major opposition from the Georgian Orthodox Church and after the passage of which she regularly used her parliamentary powers to monitor its implementation.

Though a member of Georgian Dream, she remained mostly independent and often aligned herself with Parliament's more liberal and libertarian groups.

She opposed the 2014 Domestic Surveillance Act, voted in favor of an Investigative Committee to study the privatization of the Sakrdisi Gold Mine, and rejected criticism of President Giorgi Margvelashvili's refusal to abandon the Avlabari Presidential Palace.

In 2015, she joined the Republican Party and ran as an opposition candidate for the Mtatsminda Parliamentary District in the 2016 legislative elections, though losing to Salome Zourabichvili.

In April 2015, she voted for a bill banning "strife-inciting speech" only after adding several amendments that criminalized hate speech based on race, religion, ethnicity, or social class.

In the Legal Affairs Committee, she pushed through a bill banning forced marriages and sponsored the Parliamentary Code of Ethics.

On 13 May 2015, she left Georgian Dream to join the Republican Party, a move that was expected by political observers as her civil libertarian views often affiliated her with the latter.

The Republican Party left the ruling coalition in April 2016 and joined the opposition, while Kordzaia became vice-chair of its parliamentary faction.

As a Republican, she served as vice-chair of the Legal Affairs Committee and a member of the European Integration Committee.

Continuing to push for liberal reforms on social issues, she sponsored an anti-femicide bill in 2016 that increased sentencing guidelines from 11 to 14 years, and another bill that would have criminalized sexual harassment in the workplace, two bills that failed in committee.

Kordzaia returned to Parliament as a Republican in 2020, though she would accept her mandate only five months later after the European Union brokered an agreement between political parties that put an end to a post-electoral boycott by the opposition.

She left the Republican Party in 2021, remaining as an independent MP.