From Georgia to Serbia, Surveillance is Being Weaponised Against Dissent

The authorities didn’t respond only with force, however. They deployed ‘Big Brother’ too, in the form of 30 Chinese-made cameras equipped with facial recognition software, bought in December 2024 for roughly 85,000 lari, or 27,000 euros. Besides recognising faces, the cameras can also discern gender and age, analyse emotions from facial expressions, and upload high-resolution photographs. 

“We saw workers installing new cameras right in front of us,” said Chanturia, an active member of the Movement for Social Democracy, a pro-democracy political movement that emerged from the protests. “And then, the next day, those new cameras were also watching.”

Security cameras now line the route taken by the marchers, allowing authorities to pick out individuals and send out fines in the post for blocking streets. When the protests began, the government hiked the fine tenfold, from 500 lari to 5,000, or roughly 1,500 euros. The average salary in Georgia is some 2,000 lari.

Chanturia has received 74 fines since February 2025, totalling 370,000 lari, or some 115,000 euros. He says he has no intention of paying.

“They might pause for a while and then suddenly 14 new fines arrive all at once, from the last two weeks,” Chanturia told BIRN. “We’d take those 14 fines and appeal against them in court, just to delay payment for as long as possible.”

‘Taking photos, filming and watching us’

The use of surveillance to crack down on public dissent is not limited to Georgia, which under Georgian Dream has drifted into Kremlin-style authoritarianism and away from the path of EU accession.

The student-led protests currently convulsing Serbia began in late 2024 too, following the collapse of an outdoor canopy at a newly renovated railway station in which 16 people died.

In June last year, Lazar Stojanovic and Ivana Milenkovic, agriculture students in Belgrade, were detained the day after a mass rally that was followed by clashes between police and protesters. Both Stojanovic and Milenkovic denied being involved in the violence, but the next day, near their faculty, they saw a man and a woman sitting on a bench, “taking photos, filming and watching us”.

Not long after, as they drove away, their car was stopped by unmarked vehicles and plainclothed officers shouting ‘Hands up!’.

“At that moment, one of them, a woman, approached and said my full name, and of course I responded,” recalled Milenkovic. “They pulled me out of the car, and when I offered my ID they told me it wasn’t necessary, just to come with them.”

Taken away in separate cars, both Milenkovic and Stojanovic said they were filmed before arriving at the police station. “They essentially filmed the ‘arrest’, except that everything was staged,” said Stojanovic.

The officers told them the videos were for internal records, yet within hours they had been published by pro-government media outlets. “They lied to us,” said Milenkovic. 

Milenkovic and Stojanovic were among eight students rounded up on June 29, 2025. With a ninth student arrested later, they were accused by prosecutors of ‘plotting subversion’, based on a bugged meeting of a group of students that, according to Stojanovic and Milenkovic, they were not present at.

The pair spent over 30 hours in detention. Stojanovic said he was forced to tell officers the passcode for his phone, while Milenkovic said she was never read her rights. The start of their trial has been set for March 2; they are both still coming to terms with the ordeal.

“You feel like you’re in a madhouse,” she said. “During all that time, I had three panic attacks, which I somehow managed to control, and for the first time in my life I experienced sleep paralysis” – a condition in which a person finds they cannot move or speak when they are falling asleep or waking up.

“I still suffer the consequences. I don’t express it much, but I can’t be alone in a room. I live alone in Belgrade, and I can’t be in silence, there always has to be some music playing in the background.”

Stojanovic said: “I still have psychological problems and am taking medication. What hurts the most is the injustice. I know I haven’t done anything wrong.”

(No) legal basis

In power since 2012, Serbia’s ruling Progressive Party has also rolled out facial recognition cameras – more than 8,000 of them as of end-2024, despite the fact a bill to legalise the use of biometric surveillance has yet to be adopted.

According to BIRN findings, most of these cameras are produced by Chinese manufacturers, such as Dahua and Hickvision. The cameras bought by the Georgian government were also made by Dahua.

An investigation by BIRN and local media Glas Sumadije, Ozon press, 021 and Juzne vesti found that more than 30 public tenders were issued between 2022 and 2024 for cameras fitted with facial recognition software.

Since the collection and processing of biometric data in Serbia is prohibited by law except under exceptional circumstances, the interior ministry has never confirmed using such technology against the current protesters. The ministry did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The police do, however, record all major public events and protests. There have been numerous cases of students and protesters being arrested after demonstrations, without any clear explanation of why and how they were identified by the police.

In Georgia, protesters have taken to wearing masks while marching. 

Unlike the Serbian Progressive Party, Georgian Dream succeeded in amending the law in December 2024 to permit the use of facial recognition technology on anyone committing a crime, including blocking streets.

Salome Shubladze, director of the Social Policy Programme at the human rights NGO Social Justice Centre, EMC, said the provision conflicts with international human rights law, which requires that any interference in private life is proportionate, lawful, and serves a legitimate purpose. 

“Such large-scale, unrestricted surveillance, monitoring, and control of people is disproportionate to the public order it claims to protect,” said Shubladze, a lawyer.

The EMC plans to take the issue to the European Court of Human Rights, “to demonstrate that the state’s actions, the excessive fines and mass surveillance, violated the European Convention, in particular the freedom of assembly”, she told BIRN.

Chanturia said: “This was, and still is, one of the regime’s main strategies and tools of repression. Alongside physical violence and psychological terror through propaganda and smear campaigns, they also used economic and financial pressure to silence people. The regime terrorised the population across the full spectrum of control.”

Fundamental risk in how data used

High-resolution surveillance systems capable of ‘remote biometric identification’, or RBI, “make it far easier for authorities to identify protesters, track activists, and therefore pressure any dissenting voices”, said Aljosa Ajanovic Andelic, a policy adviser at European Digital Rights, EDRi, a network of NGOs, experts, advocates and academics promoting digital rights in Europe.

While acknowledging the “legitimate fear” over the security of data collected by cameras procured from companies linked to authoritarian regimes such as China, Ajanovic Andelic said the fundamental risks remains “how Georgian and Serbian authorities use this infrastructure” – how the data is collected, how long it is stored for, whether biometric profiles are created, and who ultimately has access.

“Once a government installs infrastructure capable of tracking every face in public space, human-rights abuses become almost impossible to prevent, and the balance of power shifts decisively away from the public towards the authorities,” he said.

Like Georgia, Serbia under the Progressive Party and President Aleksandar Vucic has drifted from the path of EU accession; reforms have slowed almost to a halt, while Vucic has bristled at criticism of his handling of the protests and a general trend of democratic backsliding. Serbia also continues to reject EU pressure to join sanctions on Russia, its veto-wielding ally in the United Nations Security Council, while deepening its relationship with China in terms of surveillance technology and major infrastructure projects.

In a written response, the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, told BIRN that EU data protection rules prohibit the processing of biometric data purely for the purpose of “personal identification”, except under specific conditions. 

Use of such data must be “duly justified, proportionate and subject to adequate safeguards” it said.

The Commission said it was “deeply troubled by the violence against peaceful protesters, journalists and politicians” in Georgia and that it was “following the situation very closely” in Serbia. 

On Georgia, the Commission called for the release of “unjustly detained politicians, journalists and activists” and the reversal of “repressive” legislation; on Serbia, it noted that “respect for fundamental rights and values, including freedom of peaceful assembly, media and academic freedom are key elements of Serbia’s EU path”.

The Georgian government did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Call for ban

Slovenian MEP Irena Joveva said that in both Georgia and Serbia, “the more autocratic regimes feel threatened by their people, the more repression is unleashed against peaceful protests”.

“It’s often that under the guise of security, governments go too far in loosening the restrictions of such surveillance,” Joveva told BIRN.

The EU’s European Media Freedom Act heavily restricts the use of surveillance against journalists, but Joveva, who was a shadow rapporteur on the Act on behalf of the centrist and liberal Renew Europe political group in the European Parliament, said it “should be extended to the whole population” and applied to candidates for accession as well.

“For accession countries such as Serbia and Georgia, I think these same laws should apply and any abuse should be punished in line with the mechanism we have in place,” said Joveva. 

“I think the EU should address not only deployment of Chinese-origin surveillance systems but also from other countries such as Israel, which is known to sell these kinds of software to autocratic governments within the EU too.”

Ajanovic Andelic said that when governments buy RBI-capable surveillance systems “from vendors with a track record of enabling repression elsewhere, with ties to authoritarian governments that might have access to their collected data, and then operate them without transparency at home, the result is a perfect recipe for human rights violations”.

Such technology “should be banned outright”, he told BIRN. “The Serbian and Georgian cases illustrate precisely why.”

This article was published as part of the Spheres of Influence Uncovered project.