The provisions of the new legislation “On Personal Data Protection” adopted by Georgian Parliament will come into force from March 1, 2024.
On June 14, 2023, the Parliament of Georgia successfully adopted the new legislation “On Personal Data Protection” in the third reading, which substantially changed existing regulations concerning the processing of personal data and expanded the grounds for data processing. Until now, the restrictive nature of the law and its inflexible norms were a significant obstacle in terms of freedom of information in the country. Before the change the list of data processing bases, coupled with restrictive norms surrounding special categories of data, created an unreasonably disproportionate balance between the protection of personal data and freedom of expression and access to information, which was accompanied by the practice of interpretation of legislative provisions massively against the content of freedom of information.