Tbilisi, 7 November, 2014, More than 50 licensed lawyers and human rights defenders took part in a workshop organised by the Council of Europe and the European Union on the Revised European Social Charter.

The European Social Charter is a Council of Europe’s treaty signed in 1961 and revised in 1996 which safeguards fundamental day-to-day freedoms and fundamental rights housing, health, education, employment, legal and social protection, freedom of movement for individuals, non-discrimination.

To ensure that States Parties comply with their commitments under the Charter, the European Committee of Social Rights has two procedures: national reports and collective complaints.  A Protocol opened for signature in 1995, which came into force in 1998, allows national and international trade union organisations, employers’ organisations and non-governmental organisations to submit to the Committee their complaints about violations of the Charter.

Georgia signed the European Social Charter in 2000; ratified it in 2005; and the Treaty entered into force in the same year.

The Tbilisi event participants looked at the mechanism to monitor the application of the Social Charter in the member states, and at Georgia’s legal obligations before the European Committee of Social Rights, in particular as regards the prohibition of discrimination and the collective complaints mechanism envisaged under the European Social Charter.  The workshop also involved exchange of experiences between Georgian lawyers, NGOs and trade unions in defending their clients’ and participants’ social rights.

Speakers included experts from the European Committee of Social Rights and from the Council of Europe Secretariat, the Georgian Bar Association, NGOs and trade unions as well as representatives from the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs of Georgia.

The recent High-level Conference held in Turin in October, 2014 gave new impetus to the Charter confirming once again the relevance of this unique legal instrument in protecting the basic human and social rights of all European citizens, thus providing a response to the increasing demand for social justice – said Alessandro SAVARIS, Deputy head of the Council of Europe Office in Tbilisi.

The activity was organised in the framework of the Council of Europe and European Union Joint Programme “Strengthening the capacity of lawyers and human rights defenders for domestic application of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and of the Revised European Social Charter (RESC)”, a regional project underway in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, the Russian Federation and Ukraine.

For more information, contact Tinatin Uplisashvili at Tinatin.uplisashvili@coe.int or call 2 913870

Read the factsheet on Georgia and its implementation of the Social Charter at  https://www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/socialcharter/CountryFactsheets/Georgia_en.pdf