On June 30, 2014, the draft Law on Changes and Amendments to the Criminal Code of Georgia was published on the official website of the Legislative Herald of Georgia. The aforementioned document is generally directed at the liberalization of the criminal law policy and serves to achieve the goals set by the Georgian Government’s National Action Plan for the Protection of Human Rights for the Years 2014-2015.
Despite the fact that the package of changes presented in the document can be assessed positively, a part of the proposed changes needs to be perfected, while some issues that need to be revised in terms of the protection of human rights in the State are not reflected in it at all.
In connection with the proposed draft law, Georgian Democracy Initiative has prepared observations and recommendations[1] that were sent to the Rapporteur of the Working Group on the Criminal Law Reform, the First Deputy Minister of Justice, Mr. Aleksandre Baramidze.
The observations and recommendations reflected in the aforementioned document deal with the issues of the retroactive force of a law in criminal law, capturing of criminals, the introduction of the grounds for discrimination as a qualifying circumstance of a crime, as well as the impermissibility of punishability of hate speech. We express hope that these issues will be taken into account when the law is initiated.
[1] The observations and recommendations were prepared in the framework of the “Monitoring of the implementation of the action plan on human rights for the improvement of the justice system” project which is being implemented by Georgian Democracy Initiative with the funding of Open Society Georgia Foundation.
