The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) has published this week new monitoring reports on Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. The Commission outlines areas of progress, outstanding issues and provides recommendations for improving the situation. 

In Armenia, ECRI says, over the past seven years, progress has been made and good practices developed in the field of inclusive education, migrant integration, and anti-discrimination legislation. However, some issues still cause concern, such as the absence of a full equality mandate given to the Human Rights Defender institution, insufficient action against hate speech and discrimination and bullying at schools, as well as delays with the adoption of the Equality Law and the fact that it does not cover all discrimination grounds.

Over the past seven years, Azerbaijan has developed good practices in education and migrant integration, but more needs to be done in the fields of legislation and tackling inflammatory rhetoric and hate speech, including at the highest political level, says the Council of Europe anti-racism body.

Despite some progress at legislative and policy levels in Georgia since 2015, racism and intolerance against some ethnic and religious groups and, in particular, against LGBTI persons remains a problem, ECRI notes. Teaching of Georgian to historical ethnic minorities is still vastly insufficient, and government officials and politicians undermined the reputation of the Public Defender (Ombudsman), which includes the function of national equality body.

For each country, ECRI has provided several recommendations on addressing the outstanding issues. It has requested the authorities of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia to implement two of these recommendations as a matter of priority and will examine the follow-up given to these two recommendations by each country within two-years’ time.