At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, Georgia has long navigated the tension between democratic aspiration and authoritarian pressure. In 2024, that tension crystallized into a single piece of legislation. The Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence has since become one of the most contested legal developments in contemporary Georgia. Supporters have defended it as a transparency measure modeled on the United States’ Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a disclosure statute traditionally associated with transparency and national security concerns. Critics, however, have condemned it as bearing far closer resemblance to Russia’s Foreign Agents Law (RFAL), a legal framework notorious for the systematic suppression of independent civil society.  

This Article examines that dispute through a comparative analysis of the American, Russian, and Georgian foreign agent frameworks. It argues that the meaning and consequences of such laws do not arise from statutory text alone, but from the political conditions in which they operate, the scope of their enforcement, and the legal and social consequences of the labels they impose. Although Georgia’s law adopts certain features associated with FARA, it ultimately aligns more closely with the Russian model in both design and effect. This Article also analyzes the law’s ongoing constitutional challenge before the Constitutional Court of Georgia and argues that the litigation reveals a deeper form of constitutional injury: the lasting reputational and institutional harm caused by compelled public labeling as an entity serving foreign interests. In doing so, it situates Georgia’s foreign influence law within a broader global pattern in which legal transparency mechanisms are increasingly deployed to justify democratic regression.