Interior Minister Order No. 104 took effect on 20 August in Georgia, the South Caucasus republic1. It gives the Migration Department of Georgia express authority to detect offences under the Labour Migration Law, impose administrative sanctions and run operational-search measures against illegal migration. It also lets the department fingerprint and photograph foreigners who hold no legal grounds to stay, or who sit under expulsion review.
One minister signs an order of this kind and it binds on publication. No vote in the Georgian parliament stands in front of it. The powers were not invented on 20 August either; they were scattered. Georgia's Ministry of Internal Affairs has been able to deport foreign nationals who join demonstrations since 1 March, under labour migration amendments carrying a three-year entry ban. Law No. 1509's fine ladder has run at 2,000 GEL (Georgian lari, roughly £550) for a first offence since 1 May, rising to 12,000 GEL on a third.
What Order No. 104 does is gather detection, sanction and biometric capture into one office. For a foreigner living in Tbilisi on a permit, the body that checks their status can now also punish it and take their fingerprints, with no file passing to a separate agency. Consolidation of that kind changes the tempo rather than the law. The same offence, found and penalised by the same officers, resolves faster and passes fewer desks at which somebody else might catch an error.
Three weeks before the order, an Iranian national holding a 2025 Georgian residence permit was reported held in a Tbilisi detention centre for foreign nationals, after his embassy declined to renew his passport. That case turned on the document standing behind the permit. Order No. 104 works on the permit itself.
