A new Council of Europe HELP course on Combating Hate Crimes was launched for 45 justice professionals, including judges, prosecutors and investigators, in Georgia.

Cristian Urse, Head of the Council of Europe Office in Georgia, Kakhaber Sabanadze, First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, Giorgi Gogadze, Deputy Prosecutor General and Vano Bolkvadze, Director of the High School of Justice opened the event that brought together State authorities, judges, prosecutors and investigators, international and national experts and Council of Europe representatives. The opening remarks stressed the strategic priority of tackling hate crime in the country and referred to the excellent cooperation of the State authorities with the Council of Europe on this, but also on all other areas of work.

Following the presentation of the Council of Europe HELP Programme by Ana Medarska-Lazova, one of the authors of the HELP course and a HELP certified tutor, Ara Ghazaryan, presented the authors’ perspective to this very novel course and provided an introduction to the European standards on effective investigation, prosecution and adjudication of hate crimes.

Nino Tsatsiashvili, Head of Human Rights and Monitoring of Quality of Investigations Department, Ministry of Internal Affairs, provided an insight on the role of the Ministry in tackling this phenomenon. The three national tutors Salome Shengelia, Aleksandre Iashvili and Levan Mekhoradze presented the role of the Prosecutor’s Office and the national courts’ practice and discussed ways of overcoming domestic challenges in combating hate crime.

The course will be implemented for a period of 3 months on the HELP online platform.

The Council of Europe HELP course on Combating Hate Crimes is aimed at providing legal professionals  with necessary skills to effectively respond to hate crime and hate speech as growing problems across Europe. The course follows three stages consisting of investigation, prosecution, and adjudication of alleged hate crimes. While discovering more facts on the cases, users are offered practical tips on how to identify bias motivation, how to work with specific vulnerable victims and how to address the bias-motivated evidence. It is the first HELP course entirely based on case scenarios. This free online course is primarily targeting legal professionals: law enforcement, including investigators; prosecutors; judges and court staff.

The course is being implemented for a group of investigators, prosecutors and judges for the first time in Georgia in 2019-2020 and it was developed under the Council of Europe Project “Fighting Discrimination, Hate Crime and Hate Speech in Georgia".

A new Council of Europe HELP course on Combating Hate Crimes was launched for 45 justice professionals, including judges, prosecutors and investigators, in Georgia. © Council of Europe