CoE Rep Verna Taylor on Georgia's 2016-2019 Action Plan
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
Last week, the Steering Committee Meeting on the implementation of the Council Of Europe Action Plan For Georgia 2016-2019 took place in Tbilisi. Upon the occasion, the Director of the Directorate General of Programs, Ms Verna Taylor, paid a short visit to Tbilisi and was kind enough to answer GEORGIA TODAY'S questions in an exclusive interview.
What is your assessment of the ongoing progress in the implementation of the 2016-2019 Action Plan?
At the Steering Committee meeting that took place on 28 May, we took stock of a robust engagement with the Georgian stakeholders along all five dimensions of the Action Plan. We worked consistently on human rights, with a view to aligning legislation and judicial practice in Georgia with the European Convention on Human Rights; in other words, to encourage a more active use of the Convention in court. We have also seen a commitment by the Parliament to exercise more consistently its supervisory role when it comes to the implementation of the decisions of the Strasbourg Court. We worked on capacity building of the Public Defender’s Office, on minority education and culture, on internet governance, as well as on media. We have also more recently started working in the areas of domestic violence and combatting discrimination and hate crimes.
Our action was very intense in the field of judiciary as well. We currently work with the Georgian stakeholders for the implementation of the Strategy for Judicial Reform, a concept elaborated with the active participation of international experts, including those of the Council of Europe. At the end of this effort, the independence of the judiciary will be enhanced, and the various institutions governing its functioning will be better equipped to work more transparently and enjoy the trust of the public. Apart from that, the Council of Europe extended specific support to key institutions such as the Bar Association or the High School of Justice, whose improvement benefits the whole judiciary.
We are equally satisfied with the work in the field of elections and local democracy, albeit smaller in size, and the specific expertise that we provided in view of combatting money laundering and terrorism financing. Institutions such as the Central Electoral Commission, the State Audit Office, the Chief Prosecutor’s Office and the other law enforcement agencies, but also the Ministry of Finance and commercial banks have been strengthened through our projects in these areas.
Finally, we continue to work in the field of confidence building across the lines that divide communities affected by conflict in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, with a view to supporting the dialogue efforts undertaken by the Georgian authorities.
What are the more challenging fields where progress is slower than the CoE would like or where the two sides (CoE and Georgia) disagree?
Georgia is clearly a case where all major stakeholders are very open to cooperation with the Council of Europe. We have seen virtually no Georgian institution that had significant reservation in engaging with our experts and pursuing improvement in the various areas of the Action Plan. Of course, Georgia is a member of the Council of Europe and its experts participate directly to the standard setting – our conventions – or monitoring exercises in all our member states, and these facts facilitate cooperation, and stimulate local ownership of the results of this cooperation.
It is true that progress in the various fields varies from one case to the other, but this is mostly due to the complexity of the topics, rather than any subjective factor. Our engagement for the reform of judiciary targets legislation, institutional design and functioning, institutional practice, and cooperation among the key stakeholders (the Parliament, the High Council of Justice, the Supreme Court, or the Government), and thus requires a long term perspective. Other projects, which have more specific goals and target fewer stakeholders, allow much quicker progress.
How satisfied is the CoE with how Georgia handled the conundrum with the Charter of Regional and Minority Languages?
The Language Charter is a specific instrument aimed at protecting and promoting Europe’s linguistic diversity as a cultural heritage, by means of enabling the speakers of various languages to enjoy more opportunities to use them in many spheres of public life. Our Action Plan worked, in this regard, to support education in minority languages, and also to increase visibility and awareness of minority cultural heritage. Georgia enjoys not only linguistic diversity, but also marks of minority culture thanks to the various communities that lived and continue to live on its territory.
Like many other countries that acceded to the Council of Europe during the 1990s, Georgia has undertaken a commitment to sign and ratify the Language Charter, whose completion is still pending. That aspect is followed at the level of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which assesses Georgia’s fulfillment of its accession commitments and obligations.
On the issue of the Meskhetian Turks- how much progress has been made since the previous action plan?
Our Action Plan includes a relevant component devoted to national minorities. As I mentioned, we worked already in this area in regard of minority language education, and protection and promotion of minority cultures.
The situation of the Meskhetian community is a specific topic, with its own particularities. While, as such, the topic has not been detailed in the Action Plan, the minority component of this document could easily accommodate a specific project devoted to this community. This could, for example, be based on the work already done by expert bodies of the Council of Europe that tackled the situation of the Meskhetian community.
With the relationship between various civil society groups as strained as ever (well-demonstrated by the events of May 17), what would be the CoE solution towards a more harmonious civil society, seeing as one of the Action Plan’s priorities is confidence building?
To be sure, in our Action Plan, confidence building measures refer to building trust across the dividing lines in the regions of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali/ South Ossetia. Our work in that sphere is promising, as we were able to organize a series of activities involving participants from all regions.
When it comes to 17 May and topics related to it, I’m pleased to highlight that, on 4 June, the Council of Europe launched a project on “Fighting discrimination, hate crimes and hate speech in Georgia.” This will be a deep engagement, during four years, working along three main dimensions: improvement of the legislation on anti-discrimination (requested as such by a number of stakeholders), review and strengthening of the policies to fight discrimination and hate crimes (which will give priority to the capacity of law enforcement agencies to tackle and investigate properly incidents of this type), and an awareness raising dimension addressed to the general public, in which civil society, the Public Defender, and several governmental agencies will have the main role.
The Action Plan lists “Supporting Georgia in developing a system of alternative dispute resolution” as one of its priorities. Could you elaborate on this?
Georgia has taken specific measures to introduce a number of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, including the one on mediation. Establishment of the Association of Mediators and special centers at the Tbilisi City Court was eventually followed by drafting a Law on Mediation. The challenge in this context remains the need to continue awareness raising activities among the public in Georgia to ensure this and other alternative dispute resolution mechanisms are actively applied in practice.
One of the main objectives of developing such mechanisms, in general, is to reduce courts’ backlog. As partner international organisations in Georgia have been actively involved in assisting the country to further enhance alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, the Council of Europe has assumed the task of providing expertise on introducing and implementing tools for measuring the case disposition rate and reducing the backlog. This process is underway with the eventual aim to have judiciary in Georgia equipped with analytical tools based on which evidence-based policy planning will be feasible, including in the context of mediation.
Vazha Tavberidze