The Council of Europe together with the Public Defender’s Office of Georgia organised a workshop on the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (known as the Istanbul Convention) and its monitoring mechanism in Tbilisi, Georgia on 19 June.
Preventing violence, protecting victims and prosecuting the perpetrators are the cornerstones of the Istanbul Convention, the most comprehensive international treaty to tackle violence against women.
The workshop covered the main standards of the Istanbul Convention with a specific focus on the monitoring process of the Convention. The Istanbul Convention has a two-pillar monitoring system consisting of an independent expert body, the Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (GREVIO) and a political body, the Committee of the Parties, which is composed of representatives of the Parties to the Istanbul Convention.
The staff of the Public Defender’s Office, NGO representatives and officials familiarised themselves with the roles of the state, human rights institutions and NGOs in the monitoring process of the Istanbul Convention. Examples and promising practices from Council of Europe countries, which have been already monitored by the GREVIO, were shared with the audience.
The workshop included a group work activity on the Article 10 of the Istanbul Convention which obliges state parties to establish national co-ordinating bodies responsible for the coordination, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the Convention together with relevant stakeholders, including NGOs.
The workshop was organised under the Council of Europe project “Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence in Georgia”.
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