FORUM 18 NEWS SERVICE, Oslo, Norway
The right to believe, to worship and witness
The right to change one’s belief or religion
The right to join together and express one’s belief
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Tuesday 24 May 2005
GEORGIA: LEGAL IMPROVEMENTS, BUT LITTLE PRACTICAL IMPROVEMENT
“Definite improvements for religious minorities have taken place in
the legal field, but on the ground little real improvement has taken
place,” Levan Ramishvili, of the Liberty Institute told Forum 18 News
Service. He was commenting on changes to laws covering religious
communities’ legal and tax status, as well as a new law affecting school
religious education. These de jure changes have been broadly welcomed by
minority religious communities, but some are unhappy at being treated as
NGOs or private legal persons. But de facto the changes have yet to make a
significant impact. Fr Gabriel Bragantini of the Catholic Church commented
on education that “In Tbilisi it may be better, but elsewhere it’s
still as it was before.” Emil Adelkhanov, of the Caucasus Institute
for Peace, Democracy and Development, stressed that religious minorities
must exercise their rights and noted that religious freedom improvements
could be reversed. He cited the results of a survey which found that
nearly 47 per cent would support destroying the literature of religious
minorities such as Baptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
GEORGIA: LEGAL IMPROVEMENTS, BUT LITTLE PRACTICAL IMPROVEMENT
By Felix Corley, Forum 18 News Service
“Definite improvements for religious minorities have taken place in
the legal field, but on the ground little real improvement has taken
place,” Levan Ramishvili, head of the Tbilisi-based Liberty Institute
human rights group, told Forum 18 News Service from the Georgian capital on
18 May. After long discussion of how religious communities should be
offered the possibility to gain legal status as religious organisations,
parliament on 6 April approved amendments to the civil code, allowing them
to register with the Ministry of Justice. President Mikheil Saakashvili
signed the amendments into law on 27 April.
Also in April 2005, parliament removed Article 199 of the Administrative
Violations Code, a Soviet-era article which allowed religious communities
to be fined for activities such as not being registered and organising
youth meetings. “Religious organisations will be put on an equal
footing with secular non-profit groups – registration will be
voluntary and not mandatory, as the Administrative Violations Code used to
require,” Ramishvili told Forum 18. “They will be able to
register as a union or a foundation.”
But some religious communities are unhappy with the status that
registering under the civil code will provide. Sozar Subari, the human
rights ombudsperson, told Forum 18 that the Catholics, Muslims and
Armenian Apostolic Church particularly opposed the idea of registering as
if they were non-governmental organisations. “They want the civil
code to be changed again to allow them to register as public religious
organisations,” he told Forum 18 from Tbilisi on 2 May.
Levon Isakhanyan, spokesperson for the Armenian Apostolic diocese of
Georgia, describes the possibility of registering the diocese as a private
legal person as “unacceptable”. “It is unacceptable for the
Armenian, Catholic, Muslim and other traditional faiths,” he told
Forum 18 from Tbilisi on 18 May. He said the issue was raised in April,
when a delegation from the Church headquarters in Echmiadzin, Armenia,
visited Georgian government and Orthodox Church representatives in
Tbilisi.
Since gaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, no religious
community had any form of legal status until a controversial 2002
concordat between the Orthodox Church and the state granted the Orthodox
Patriarchate legal status and numerous privileges denied to all other
religious communities. When the Vatican and the Georgian state were on the
point of signing a concordat in September 2003, which would have granted
the Catholic Church legal status, huge Orthodox-led street demonstrations
led to the abrupt cancelling of the signing ceremony (see F18News 25
September 2003 ).
A new Law on General Education, which separates state schools and religion
treaching, was also adopted. This narrows the interpretation of article 5.1
of the state concordat with the Orthodox Church, which allowed teaching of
Orthodoxy as an elective part of the school curriculum, also giving the
Orthodox Church control of the curriculum, and appointments and dismissals
of teachers. The new law states that such Orthodox teaching may only take
place after school hours and cannot be controlled by the school or
teachers. Also, outsiders, including clergy, cannot regularly attend or
direct students’ extracurricular activity or students’ clubs or their
meetings.
Religious minorities have broadly welcomed the changes to school religious
education. In recent years, many had been unhappy that such religious
education took the form of narrow Orthodox education and compulsory
prayers in the local Orthodox church (see F18News 19 November 2003
). However, as human
rights activists and religious minority leaders point out, practice has
not always kept pace with the law. “The education law has been
adopted and the legal framework changed, but this has not yet been
implemented,” Ramishvili of the Liberty Institute told Forum 18.
Fr Gabriel Bragantini, who heads the Catholic diocese of Kutaisi
[Kut’ai’si] in western Georgia, complains that school religion lessons in
his area are still Orthodox denominational lessons. “Teachers speak
only of the Georgian Orthodox Church,” he told Forum 18 from Kutaisi
on 18 May. “All children have to go to the lessons. In Tbilisi it may
be better, but elsewhere it’s still as it was before.”
These legal moves follow a new Tax Code adopted by parliament last
December, which grants certain tax exemptions to religious organisations.
“However, the Patriarchate has more privileges than other religious
organisations,” Ramishvili of the Liberty Institute noted.
Despite these legal changes – which come after nearly a decade of
discrimination against religious minorities and a five year reign of
terror against Protestants, True Orthodox, Catholics and Jehovah’s
Witnesses from 1999-2003 – religious minorities still face intermittent
threats, obstruction to their right to meet for worship and a de facto ban
on building new places of worship (see forthcoming F18News article).
Emil Adelkhanov, of the Tbilisi-based Caucasus Institute for Peace,
Democracy and Development, welcomes the possibility for religious
communities to gain legal status. But he stresses that they themselves
have to take the initiative to exercise their rights. “The problem is
that such a law works if not only minorities want it to work,” he told
Forum 18 on 17 May. Many religious minority leaders told Forum 18 they were
unaware of the changes to the civil code which make registration possible.
Adelkhanov believes that the government has the incentive to “please
Europe” at the moment. “But our experience has shown that Europe
can be indulgent, and the authorities know that quite well.” He fears
that slow improvements in the religious freedom climate could be reversed.
“As long as the mentality of the general population remains the same,
there is no guarantee that the story won’t recur after the incentive given
by Europe is gone – after the immediate goals have been achieved.”
He points to the depth of popular hostility to religious minorities and
cites a 2004 survey carried out by the Tbilisi-based International Centre
on Conflict and Negotiation. Nearly 47 per cent of respondents said they
would support destroying religious minorities’ literature, while only 10
per cent would defend religious minority rights.
Nearly 44 per cent of respondents believed that were Georgia to adopt a
religion law, it should ban the activity of “sects”, such as the
Baptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, with a further 34 per cent believing it
should restrict their activities. More than 20 per cent of the population
believed such a law should ban the activities of Catholics, Muslims and
other faiths regarded as more traditional, with a further 38 per cent
believing it should restrict their activity. Only 25 per cent believed
such “traditional” faiths should be fully protected with only
just over 6 per cent believing that “sects” should also be fully
protected.
For background information see Forum 18’s Georgia religious freedom survey
at
A printer-friendly map of Georgia is available at
tlas/index.html?Parent=asia&Rootmap=georgi
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