The present document provides an analysis of the femicide and femicide attempt cases, committed in 2016 with regard to Georgia’s commitment to protect and support victims of violence.

The report reviews the definition of the term Femicide and its main characteristics. Also, articles of the Criminal Code of Georgia in which Femicide is found are discussed; complexities of identifying Femicide and ways to identify; also, the results of monitoring of the cases of femicide and femicide attempts are presented, deficiencies at the level of Court and recommendations. In annexes can be found statistics of the Prosecutor’s Office on the Killings of Women in 2016 and detailed analysis of the discussed cases by Public Defender of Georgia.

In 2013, the UN General Assembly made the resolution on femicide. The resolution calls on the member countries to take any possible measures for the elimination of gender-related killings of women and girls. In order to implement the legislation and policy of prevention and elimination of this type of crime, the resolution outlines one of the tools to fight this crime: collecting data on cases of femicide, analyzing it and sharing the results.

In 2015, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its Causes and Consequences, Dubravka Šimonović, called on the UN member countries to carry out goal-oriented work on the prevention of gender-related killings of women. She also called on them to create a femicide monitoring system with the aim of examining this kind of crime.

In order to fulfill the recommendations of the UN Special Rapporteur, on November 25, 2016, the Public Defender of Georgia declared readiness for creating “the Femicide Monitoring Mechanism” with technical support of UN Women.

Within the scope of its mandate and through “the Femicide Monitoring Mechanism”, the Public Defender seeks to analyze each case of killing of a woman, attempted murder and incitement to suicide on the grounds of gender. This will result in identifying deficiencies in the mechanism of protection for victims/sufferers and refining and implementing the mechanism afterwards.

The present document is a special report of the Office of the Public Defender of Georgia within the framework of “the Femicide Monitoring Mechanism”. The crimes analyzed in this report were committed in 2016. We hope the presented discoveries and recommendations will be taken into consideration in the process of planning and implementing the State policy against femicide.

The report was prepared within the UN Women joint programme for gender equality, with the financial support of the Swedish Government.