On June 23, 2015, the Public Defender of Georgia and the United Nations Organization - the UN Women held a joint meeting dedicated to issues of gender equality and legal rights of women. The meeting was moderated by of UN Women Representative in Georgia Erika Kvapilova.

At the meeting, Public Defender of Georgia Ucha Nanuashvili briefly reviewed the chapter of the Parliamentary report - gender equality and women’s rights. He spoke about main directions and aspects reflected in the report, recommendations that he issued towards relevant agencies. He noted that achieving gender equality remains one of the serious problems in Georgia. Society still lives in stereotypical environment where in majority of cases domestic violence against women is a justifiable action; number of early marriages is high, women represent minority at the decision-making level and cases of violation of rights on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation are frequent.

Head of the Department of Gender Equality of the Public Defender’s Office of Georgia Eka Skhiladze presented special report “On results of monitoring of penitentiary establishment N5 for women”. The monitoring report reflects needs of female prisoners and recommendations prepared on the basis of assessments. During the monitoring, degrading form of prisoners’ search, violation of hygiene-sanitary norms and shortcomings of accessibility of medicines were revealed. Not all prisoners have access to a library, sporting halls and a computer room. Rehabilitation and re-socialization programmes are not adequately implemented. Especially acute is the issue of separation of mothers and children who reached the age of three. Also, the issue of provision of children with seasonal clothing and especially food is not resolved.

Consultant invited by the UN Women at the Public Defender’s office Mary Maglaperidze spoke about issues of violence against women and domestic violence. She presented results of monitoring of shelter and hotline for domestic violence victims, study of cases of women’s killings that occurred in 2014, and implementation of restriction and protection orders.

According to the report, scale of violence against women and domestic violence is alarming. In 2014, 17 women were killed as a result of domestic violence. Violence against women has long surpassed the closed space and the main challenge, togehter with indifferent attitude of the society, is ineffective use of protection and assistance mechanisms. Often, mechanisms envisaged by the law are not used to protect women - victims of violence and thus their request for help remains ignored.

At the discussion, issues on the agenda also included the situation of LGBT persons in the penitentiary establishment, necessity of introduction of amendments into the election law aimed at strengthening of political participation of women, situation of medical programmes for drug addict women and women with Hepatitis, strengthening of the role of local self governing bodies and policemen in the fight against domestic violence in regions, importance of increasing timeframes of placement of domestic violence victims in shelters and public awareness-raising.