A growing number of foreigners are being denied entry to Georgia for no stated reason.

Earlier in September, I read that a 26-year-old Azerbaijani graduate student in the journalism program at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs, Javad Ahmedov, was returning to Georgia to start the new school year after making a short trip home to see friends and family.

Border officials had other ideas. They informed Ahmedov that he was barred from entering Georgia, according to a published account. They wouldn’t give him a reason. “When I asked why … they just kept repeating ‘for other reasons,’” he posted on social media. “All the policemen looked at the US visa in my passport one by one and made serious faces, as if this was a big sin.”

Upon reflection, Ahmedov at least has an idea about why he was refused entry: Georgian authorities suspected he participated in anti-government protests. When he was leaving the country in late August, border officials told him he had been fined ‘for blocking a road’ in Tbilisi, but added that he could settle the matter upon his return. In an interview with RFE/RL, he insisted he was covering a protest in the capacity of a journalist, and was not involved in blocking any thoroughfare.

Ahmedov’s experience is far from an isolated incident. Once one of the most welcoming locations for foreigners in the former Soviet Union, entering Georgia is now an uncertain proposition for those deemed by the authoritarian-minded Georgian Dream government as undesirable or potential troublemakers.

Some long-term expatriate residents of Georgia, most notably a former US diplomat and a Lithuanian women’s rights activist who each had lived in the country for over a decade, are among the highest-profile instances of arbitrary entry denials in 2025.

Apart from dozens of European journalists, political activists from other former Soviet countries, and Ukrainians fleeing the war, numerous tourists and international students from India and Pakistan have also claimed to have been subject to the same treatment since late 2024.

The practice of arbitrary entry denial, under which Georgian authorities do not give entry-refuseniks a specific reason for their decision, has been so rampant in recent months that Kazakhstan has demanded official explanations from Tbilisi. Meanwhile, France and Poland issued travel advisories in May of this year, warning citizens of its frequent occurrence.

The arbitrary nature of the practice is underscored by the fact several Russian public figures who have previously violated Georgian laws by visiting Abkhazia without prior Georgian permission have recently been admitted into the country.

I can easily relate to how all those who have been refused entry feel. I gained first-hand experience about arbitrary denials on the last day of 2024, when I was refused entry to Georgia – detained at Tbilisi Airport, and sent back to Turkey without being provided any reason.

As a US-based historian specializing in the South Caucasus, I have spent well over a decade studying Georgia’s history, culture, literature, and language. Between 2012 and 2019, I entered Georgia on sixteen occasions and never broke any laws. Shortly after my last trip to Georgia in 2019, I began taking intensive courses of Georgian and acquired a functional command of the language. Flash forward to 2024: several months after I defended my doctoral dissertation, I decided to travel to Georgia to celebrate New Year’s in Tbilisi after a half-decade of not having visited the country. Although I was keenly aware of the volatile political situation in Georgia and sympathetic to the pro-Western protest movement, I had no intention of going anywhere near the ongoing street demonstrations and planned to spend only five days in the country to reunite with my friends, celebrate the holidays, acquire books for my research, practice the language, experience the culture, and savor the local cuisine.

I boarded my Tbilisi-bound flight in Istanbul on the night of December 30, 2024, the day before large-scale protests erupted in Tbilisi in response to the controversial inauguration of Georgia’s new president, Mikheil Kavelashvili, from the ruling Georgian Dream Party.

As soon as I landed in Tbilisi in the early hours of December 31, my ordeal began with a bizarre exchange with two immigration officers at passport control. As I handed my passport to one of the two officers sharing the same booth, I started conversing with them in Georgian, which noticeably piqued their interest in my background. After a series of questions about how I learned Georgian despite not having a Georgian entry stamp in my passport (which was issued after my most recent, 2019 visit to the country), one of the officers asked me what my favorite country was, to which I responded, not without a sense of irony, the United States, the country I call home.

Not satisfied with my response, the officer followed up by asking which country had the most interesting history in my opinion. To this, I answered, with a greater sense of irony, the entire Caucasus – the region I had studied for more than a decade. After a few more unusual language- and travel-related questions, the same officer suddenly called me by my preferred name, which indicated that he had been googling me on his computer while asking me those questions.

Shortly thereafter, the two officers told me to stand aside near the passport control booth. After waiting for about 10 minutes, I was approached from behind by another officer who asked me whether I had accommodation in Tbilisi in an abrasive tone. Then, he handed me a sheet of paper stating that I had been refused entry to Georgia for unspecified reasons “envisaged by Georgian authorities.”

For the next three hours I was a de facto detainee at passport control, as all the officers on duty refused to speak with me, but withheld my passport. I grew exhausted and exasperated. While I was sitting on the floor, charging my electronic devices at the only power outlet in the area, an older man in uniform shouted my last name from quite a distance away. Seeing him holding my passport in his hand, I quickly gathered my belongings and headed his way. As I struggled to keep up with his quick pace, he led me into a room where three younger officers were ready to run a security check on me.

Visibly surprised at my command of the Georgian language, all four officers expressed disbelief upon hearing that I had been denied entry to the country. As soon as the security officers cleared me, the same older man led me onto a jet bridge that led to an aircraft belonging to the Turkish budget airline Pegasus. Only upon boarding that flight did I find out that I was being sent back to Turkey, where I held neither citizenship nor permanent residency.

My ordeal didn’t end with my departure from Georgia. Instead of returning my passport to me, the elderly Georgian officer handed it to the flight’s captain, who kept it in his cockpit until all the other passengers had disembarked from the aircraft after the two-plus-hour flight had landed in Istanbul’s Sabiha GökçenAirport. After signing some paperwork, the captain handed my passport to an airport staff member, who led me into the airport terminal and instructed me to sit on a bench before taking my passport into a nearby office.

After another four-hour wait, I was asked to undergo another round of security checks and then led to the passport checkpoint. Following a rather friendly exchange with a Turkish immigration officer in his native Turkish, a language I struggled with, I finally regained my passport, which had had its Turkish exit stamp from the previous visit annulled. Six hours later, I found myself celebrating my newly regained freedom with an overpriced İskender kebab inside the international terminal of the IstanbulAirport on the other end of the transcontinental metropolis. After what felt like the soundest nap in my life, I touched down in New York just in time for 2025 to kick in.

The cause of my entry denial to Georgia is still unknown. As I continue regularly stumbling upon news of foreign nationals being arbitrarily refused entry to Georgia and other indications of Georgia’s democratic backsliding, I know for a fact that I will not set foot in that country again until the ruling Georgian Dream Party relinquishes power.