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Western politicians and diplomats have called for a halt to escalating violence in Georgia, after security forces used water cannon, teargas, stun grenades and rubber bullets overnight to break up a peaceful rally against a “foreign influence” bill, the Guardian reports.

The EU, which has granted Georgia candidate status, on Wednesday “strongly condemned” the violence and called on the government to respect the right of peaceful assembly. “Use of force to suppress it is unacceptable,” the bloc’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said on X.

Police detained 63 protesters in the capital, Tbilisi, and six officers were injured, the country’s interior ministry said, as authorities sharply escalated their crackdown on the three-week-old protest movement on Tuesday night.

Georgia’s opposition parties, the EU and the US have all criticised the bill, which would force NGOs, civil rights groups and media to register as “foreign agents” if more than 20% of their funding comes from abroad. They say it is authoritarian and Russian-inspired.

Tuesday’s rally continued well past midnight, with about 2,000 people blocking traffic outside parliament on Tbilisi’s main avenue and other key roads, braving masked riot police who attacked protesters with rubber batons.

Several journalists and opposition politicians were also attacked. Levan Khabeishvili, the leader of Georgia’s main opposition party, the United National Movement of the jailed former president Mikheil Saakashvili, posted a photo of his badly beaten face.

Georgia’s president, Salome Zourabichvili, who opposes the government but whose powers are mostly ceremonial, appealed to the interior minister to stop the violence, calling the crackdown “totally unwarranted, unprovoked and out of proportion”.