CoE Commissioner urges Tbilisi to address “underlying reasons” affecting sexual, other minorities

Dunja Mijatović, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, on Tuesday urged the Georgian Government to address the “underlying reasons” behind discrimination and intolerance towards LGBTQI people, religious and other minority groups in the country. 

Publishing her submission to the CoE Committee of Ministers after supervising the execution of judgments related to Identoba, a Tbilisi-based non-governmental organisation promoting the rights of women and sexual minorities, for the European Court of Human Rights, Mijatović called on the Georgian Government to implement her six recommendations made last year to address discrimination and intolerance, as well as issues related to peaceful assembly and expression involving specific communities. 

The Commissioner further noted while the overall societal attitudes towards LGBTQI people and religious and other minorities had been “gradually improving” in the country, the response given by the Georgian authorities to repeated occurrence of discrimination and manifestations of intolerance towards those minority groups “has up until now failed to address the broad spectrum of underlying reasons”. 

Her recommendations to the Government included implementing a “zero-tolerance policy and practice” towards all forms of discrimination and incitement to discrimination and violence, combating impunity for serious human rights violations committed against LGBTQI people and other minority groups, and identifying and “effectively addressing any existing patterns of institutional culture within law enforcement agencies or the criminal justice system” which could contribute to promoting such impunity. 

The recommendations also called for measures to ensure the right to freedom of peaceful assembly of LGBTQI people and other groups, prevent and combat hate speech and develop and implement a “comprehensive and multi-dimensional state policy on protecting the human rights” of the targeted communities, the CoE press office said.