Summary

  • Georgia's Digital Governance Agency is identified in its own public communication as operating in relation to the Ministry of Justice and the agencies in that ministry's system, with a special role in the digitisation of services and in information and cybersecurity.
  • The instrument that established the agency — its type, number, title and adoption date — was not retrieved from Georgia's legislative repository, and no per-handle registry record or number-resource holding attributable to the agency could be verified.
  • The gap is a verification problem rather than an accusation: the agency's remit is documented in its own words, and the missing elements are precisely the two that an outsider would use to test the scope of that remit.

What the agency says about itself

In material published on its own site, the agency's Georgian-language text places two names side by side: the Deputy Minister of Justice, Tamar Zodelava, and the Chairman of the Digital Governance Agency, Sandro Tsirekidze (the agency's site). The same passage states that the Ministry of Justice and the agencies within its system bear responsibility for delivering important state services to citizens, and that the Digital Governance Agency has been assigned a special role in the digitisation of services and in the area of information and cybersecurity (the agency's site).

That is a self-description by a state body in its own channel, and it is worth taking at face value for what it is: a statement of how the agency positions itself and of who its leadership is. It carries three usable facts. First, the agency presents itself as an entity whose work is organised through the Ministry of Justice's system rather than as a standalone regulator. Second, its described remit has two limbs — service digitisation and information/cybersecurity — that in many jurisdictions sit in different institutions, under different statutes and with different oversight.

Third, the individuals named give the agency a public face: a ministry deputy and an agency chairman appearing together in the same communication.

A separate characterisation of the agency, prepared as a summary of the same page, goes further and describes the body as a Legal Entity of Public Law within the system of the Ministry of Justice, with a remit covering nationwide electronic service delivery, digital-governance support and information/cybersecurity (the agency's site). That sentence is a summary rather than a quotation. The legal-form label it uses, and the word "statutory" attached to the remit, are not carried by the verbatim text captured from the same page. Readers should treat the label as a working description of how the entity is registered and summarised, not as the agency's own words and not as a paraphrase of the instrument that would define it.

What the public record did not yield

Two questions were put to the public record in this research, and both came back empty.

The first concerns the founding instrument. A retrieval aimed at Georgia's legislative repository, the Legislative Herald, did not surface the legal act that established the agency. Its type — whether a law, a government decree, a ministerial order or a charter — was not established; neither was its number, its title, nor the date on which it was adopted. No provision-level text of that instrument is held here. This is a retrieval outcome, recorded on a dated basis, and not a statement about what Georgia's legislation contains. It is nonetheless the single most consequential absence in this report, because the instrument is the document that would answer the second-order questions a counterparty actually has: which body supervises the agency, what the agency may lawfully do, and where its competence stops.

The second concerns the agency's footprint as a holder of number resources. No per-handle registry profile for the identifier associated with the agency could be verified with the retrieval tools used here, and no autonomous system number, IPv4 block or IPv6 block attributable to the agency was retrieved. Again, this is a statement about what could be verified in this research rather than a finding that the agency holds nothing.

It matters because an institution whose stated competence includes the delivery of state electronic services and cybersecurity is an institution whose resilience depends on addresses, routing and the organisations that hold them.

The directory entry maintained for this agency is published at the BTW directory, and it is offered on the same terms: a registration of the entity, not a substitute for the instrument.

Why an absent instrument is a governance problem, not a filing problem

It is tempting to treat a missing founding text as an inconvenience of scholarship. For the parties that deal with an agency like this one, it is something more practical.

Consider a foreign vendor negotiating a cloud or identity contract with the agency. Its compliance team has to decide whether the counterparty can bind the state, under what authority, and with what remedy if the authority proves narrower than assumed. The ministry's own communication is reassuring but not dispositive: an agency can be described as sitting within a ministry's system while being constituted, funded and supervised in ways that are set out only in the instrument nobody has produced. The contract lawyer's question — what is the source of this entity's capacity to contract in the name of the state?

— is answered by the instrument or not at all.

Consider a domestic operator that needs to interoperate with state e-services. Its engineering and legal teams need to know whether the agency sets standards, operates platforms, or both, and whether its cybersecurity role carries any compliance authority over private networks. Mandate language published on a website tells them what the agency aspires to do. The instrument tells them what it may require of them.

Consider a parliamentary committee or an auditor. Oversight rests on the ability to trace an agency's remit, budget line and reporting duty to a text with a number and a date. Where that trace is not publicly available, oversight does not become impossible, but it becomes dependent on the supervised body's own account of itself — which is precisely the position an oversight mechanism is designed to avoid.

None of these scenarios requires a theory of misconduct. The ordinary condition is that a well-run agency publishes its legal basis prominently and a less settled one does not. The consequence, however, is the same in both cases: the agency's public description of its own authority becomes the only widely available account of that authority.

The registry question and what it says about institutional visibility

Agency status in the internet's registries is a different kind of evidence from a legal instrument, and it is often easier to obtain. A member listing, an allocated block, an autonomous system number — each is a registry's own record, and each can be checked by a third party without asking permission.

In this research, that check did not produce a result. The registry material consulted did not yield a per-handle profile for the agency under its identifier, and no number-resource holding could be attributed to it. That leaves an open question rather than a settled one, and it has two plausible readings that point in opposite directions. The first is that the agency's connectivity is arranged through a parent body, a shared government platform or a state telecommunications provider, so that the addresses and routing a reader might expect to find under the agency's own name sit elsewhere.

The second is that the agency does hold such resources but that they are not reachable through the public routes consulted here. The two readings have very different implications for accountability — one spreads responsibility across a chain of state bodies, the other concentrates it — and this research cannot tell them apart.

That ambiguity is itself the finding. Where an institution's legal basis and its registry footprint are both hard to establish from public sources, the practical effect is that the institution's public communications carry more weight than they were designed to carry.

How to read this report

Three claims are documented here, and they rest on the agency's own published words: that the agency describes itself as working in relation to the Ministry of Justice and the agencies in its system; that it assigns itself a special role in service digitisation and in information and cybersecurity; and that its chairman is named in the same material as Sandro Tsirekidze, alongside Deputy Minister of Justice Tamar Zodelava.

Two claims are not made here, and readers should be alert to the difference. This report does not assert that the agency lacks a valid legal basis, and it does not assert that the agency holds no number resources. It records that neither the founding instrument nor a per-handle registry footprint could be verified from open sources on the dates the research was carried out. Those are dated statements about retrievability.

One further caution belongs here rather than in a footnote. The characterisation of the agency as a Legal Entity of Public Law comes from a summary of its page, not from its own quoted text, and the same summary supplies the word "statutory" for a remit the quoted text states without that qualifier. Where this report uses the shorter phrase "within the Ministry of Justice's system", it follows the agency's own wording. Where it uses the LEPL label, it is describing a registration convention, not quoting an instrument.

Sources

  • Digital Governance Agency of Georgia — the agency's own site; the source of the verbatim Georgian passage naming its chairman and Deputy Minister of Justice Tamar Zodelava, describing the Ministry of Justice and the agencies in its system, and assigning the agency a special role in service digitisation and information/cybersecurity.
  • Legislative Herald of Georgia — Georgia's official repository of normative acts; consulted for the agency's founding instrument, which was not retrieved.
  • BTW directory entry for the agency — the entity record maintained for this subject.

Statements about the founding instrument and about number-resource holdings are dated retrieval outcomes from research carried out on 17 October 2026. Readers with access to Georgian legislative materials, or to registry records not reachable through public routes, are in a position to close both gaps directly.