On March 21, 2018, the Legislative Herald of Georgia published the Law of Georgia on Safety at Work and the attached amendments. Adoption of the mentioned law should be assessed as a step forward.

The abovementioned law establishes a mechanism for enforcing the obligations in the field of safety at work. In particular, the supervisory body (the Ministry of Labour, Health and Social Affairs) is granted the authority to inspect safety norms and use sanctions in case of detection of violations in the high-risk, hard, harmful and hazardous workplaces.

The adopted law is better than the initially submitted draft law, as the parliamentary working group, with the involvement of the representatives of the Public Defender, took into consideration a number of remarks. Specifically, the amount of sanctions has been significantly increased and certain provisions of the draft law have been improved. However, it should be criticized that a number of principled remarks of the Public Defender, concerning the expansion of the scope of the law and authorizing the supervisory body to unconditionally inspect an employer, have not been considered in the law. Another subject of the Public Defender's criticism was the financial side of the draft law, as it did not consider budget resources for strengthening the supervisory body, including for increasing the staff resources.

It should be noted that the sanctions envisaged by the Law on Safety at Work will take effect on 1 August 2018. In addition, the Georgian Government, in agreement with its social partners, shall define a list of potentially high-risk, hard, hazardous and harmful workplaces. The Public Defender hopes that the Government will timely adopt the mentioned legal act, while the safety requirements will be effectively fulfilled in practice, which will improve the situation of the employees.