The Public Defender’s office is abolishing two departments — one focused on gender equality issues and the other on strategic litigation — as part of a reorganisation, according to two former deputy public defenders.
The changes have been criticised by civil society representatives, who argue that both units performed specialised functions that could be difficult to maintain without dedicated teams.
OC Media has contacted the Public Defender’s Office for comment, but has so far received no response to its calls or messages.
Established in May 2013, the department made the Office of the Public Defender the first state institution in Georgia to create a specialised structural unit dealing with gender issues.
The gender department’s work covered three main areas. The first involved examining individual complaints and cases concerning domestic violence, violence against women, women’s reproductive health and rights, early and child marriage, and other issues related to gender equality.
The second covered monitoring and research, including the preparation of numerous reports and the monitoring of various institutions and public bodies, as well as the situation across the country.
The third area involved developing gender equality policies, including policies for the Office of the Public Defender itself.
Speaking to OC Media, Skhiladze said the department had received domestic recognition and had been highlighted in numerous international reports. She cited the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, who had explicitly identified the existence of a femicide monitoring mechanism within the Office of the Public Defender as an example of good practice.
Skhiladze suggested that the office’s likely response would be that it intended to continue working on gender issues by distributing the responsibilities among other structural units, rather than abandoning the work altogether.
However, she argued that this would not be sufficient.
‘International standards, as well as established practice, show that work on gender issues requires a dual approach’, Skhiladze said.
She explained that gender considerations should be integrated into every area of an institution’s work, including areas such as financial and administrative affairs that might not immediately appear to be related to gender equality.
However, she said this approach, known as gender mainstreaming, should be accompanied by a separate specialised unit responsible for overseeing the integration process and developing gender policies.
‘No one disputes that gender issues should be integrated into every area of work. But the dual approach means that, at the same time, there must be a separate specialised unit’, she said.
Skhiladze argued that, by abolishing the department, the public defender had effectively removed gender issues from its policy agenda.
Asked about the potential consequences, Skhiladze said that work on gender issues, including the examination of individual cases, required particular sensitivity and different standards of assessment.
She argued that standard procedures for responding to complaints and cases would often be insufficient when dealing with issues such as early and child marriage, domestic violence, and violence against women.
Drawing on her many years of experience in different positions at the Public Defender’s office, Skhiladze said she found it difficult to imagine a non-specialised department carrying out this work adequately.
She said it required specialised knowledge, a dedicated approach, and flexibility, which would be difficult to provide through other departments given their existing workloads.
Skhiladze also warned that the decision would weaken the public defender’s position and make it harder to ensure that gender-related issues were comprehensively and expertly reflected in its parliamentary reports.
She noted that the office had already done very little policy work on gender issues in recent years.
The former deputy public defender also criticised the decision as a failure to withstand political pressure. She linked it to a wider trend in another country of removing the word ‘gender’ from different areas of public life.
‘I cannot be convinced that this was justified by any evidence-based approach, rather than simply being the public defender’s decision to fall in line with the existing policy’, she said.
The gender department was established in May 2013, following an earlier structural unit that had operated in the form of a division. Skhiladze became head of the department in November 2013 and said she had overseen its growth from its early months.
From 2016, she served as deputy public defender under two public defenders and supervised the department’s work.
She said the abolition was particularly painful because it dismantled work that had taken many years to build, despite internal and external challenges.
‘Gender issues have never been a popular subject for anyone. Yet today, everything we managed to achieve and build over many years has been dismantled at a stroke’, she said.
Skhiladze added that the Office of the Public Defender had effectively been the only state institution that formally maintained gender issues as a priority.
‘Now, even that has disappeared’, she said.
Strategic litigation unit also being abolished
On Friday, former deputy public defender Giorgi Burjanadze, who served as deputy public defender from 2018 to 2023, wrote that the Public Defender’s office was also abolishing its strategic litigation unit, which was responsible for constitutional litigation.
Burjanadze said the public defender had a constitutional mandate to apply to Georgia’s Constitutional Court, a function that could not be removed through an organic law.
He identified three areas in which the public defender could approach the court: cases concerning laws that conflict with human rights, disputes between state bodies, and matters relating to elections or referendums, whether already held or yet to take place.
Burjanadze said the strategic litigation unit had been established in 2019 to help the office fulfil this constitutional function.
Although the office had not previously had a dedicated unit for this purpose, he said the newly established team operated with three employees and enabled the public defender to bring numerous human rights issues before the Constitutional Court.
‘More than 50 constitutional complaints were prepared and submitted while we were at the Office of the Public Defender’, Burjanadze said.
He described this as a record, arguing that the five previous public defenders had submitted fewer complaints collectively than the unit managed to submit over five years.
Burjanadze said the unit’s purpose was to take issues identified by the Office of the Public Defender through individual complaints and challenge them before the Constitutional Court.
He claimed that, during the first years of current Public Defender Levan Ioseliani’s tenure, the number of constitutional complaints submitted had fallen sharply, to approximately three or four a year, before the unit was abolished altogether.
Burjanadze questioned how the office would fulfil its constitutional mandate without the dedicated team.
He said the unit’s staff had specialised knowledge and experience, adding that constitutional litigation required particular skills that not everyone possessed.
‘Not everyone can draft a constitutional complaint. This is highly specialised work that requires litigation skills and experience’, he said.
Burjanadze described the decision to abolish the unit as difficult to understand, arguing that the office would no longer have a dedicated structure to carry out this important constitutional function.