The Council of Europe organised a working meeting with representatives from state and non-state institutions in order to discuss challenges in the collection of data on discrimination, hate crime and hate speech in Georgia, and set the future steps towards development of unified methodology. The working meeting involved the participants from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Prosecutor’s Office, Public Defender’s Office and NGOs, who had previously participated in the Council of Europe study visits on data collection.

The aim of the meeting was to discuss the Council of Europe recommendations on data collection and to review their implementation process. Towards the end of the meeting, stakeholders jointly devised future steps responding to the existing challenges in implementation of a unified collection of data on discrimination, hate crimes and hate speech in line with Council of Europe standards and practices. The discussions were facilitated by a Council of Europe expert.

The work on improving joint data collection on discrimination, hate crimes and hate speech in line with Council of Europe standards and practices started in September 2018. It includes developing recommendations and guidelines, as well as capacity building to improve the data collection practices.

The process is supported by the co-operation project “Fight against Discrimination, Hate Crimes and Hate Speech in Georgia” which is implemented under the Council of Europe’s Action Plan for Georgia 2016-2019 with the support of the Danish Neighbourhood Programme in Georgia (DANEP).