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00:00 Then to Tbilisi, we're going to talk to correspondent Riju Shanti who joins us from there.
00:04 First of all then, just update us with what the situation at the Parliament now is, can you?
00:09 And of course, what happened yesterday?
00:11 Yeah, exactly. As you said, finally, the police managed to disperse the crowd this morning.
00:18 There were just a few thousand at six o'clock in the morning, while yesterday evening there
00:22 were about 25,000. The idea was to stay all night long around the Parliament to prevent
00:28 the MPs to go in. But maybe there was a rumor that they were already in. Whatever, at nine
00:34 o'clock finally, or after nine, the Parliament, the majority, voted for the first reading,
00:39 I mean the first exam of this third reading of the law. And they passed it within one minute,
00:46 about one minute. And none of the opposition MPs were allowed to go into the room, probably
00:53 because they were doing everything very quickly and they were surprised that it was even
00:58 started. So it shows a lot about how the government is in a hurry to pass this law,
01:03 while of course, obviously there is a huge opposition to this law in the street that
01:08 will probably continue tonight.
01:09 And it's gearing up to be a pretty big week there, isn't it?
01:13 Yeah, exactly, because this is exactly what we could see, we could hear in your little
01:20 reports, that the people are really feeling that once this law would be passed, they will be on
01:27 the other side of the wall, I would say. And this is really a strong feeling here, and that they
01:32 would be in Russia. And last week, the government used a lot of violence, even used some people
01:37 which were not from the police, apparently, to exert some brutality on the people. There were
01:42 a lot of thousands of phone calls to threaten the people, to insult them. So they feel that
01:48 they already have somehow the Russian law and it gives them an idea of what it could be.
01:53 So probably that we will see the protests growing again. On the first reading, there were about
01:59 40,000 in the street. On the second reading, there were twice more. So let's see how many
02:04 there will be tonight in the streets of Tbilisi.
02:06 Brigitte Janty, thanks very much, joining us there live from Tbilisi.