Georgia’s landmark 2014 anti-discrimination legislation marked a decade in 2024. The record on employment discrimination enforcement is mixed at best.
Georgia’s Law on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination was adopted in May 2014, primarily as a condition of the EU Association Agreement and the associated visa liberalisation process. The law prohibits discrimination on 18 grounds — including sex, age, disability, religion, ethnicity, and sexual orientation — in all areas of public and private life, including employment. It established the Public Defender (Ombudsman) as the primary enforcement body, with authority to investigate complaints, issue recommendations, and apply to courts for remediation orders.
Ten years after adoption, the enforcement record in employment discrimination cases provides a sobering assessment of the gap between legislative ambition and institutional capacity. The Public Defender’s Office received 3,847 discrimination complaints in the period 2015–2024. Of these, 612 related to employment discrimination — approximately 16 percent of the total. Of the 612 employment cases, 89 resulted in substantive recommendations to employers or public bodies; 34 resulted in court proceedings; and 11 produced enforceable outcomes — injunctions, reinstatement orders, or financial compensation.
This means that over a decade, Georgia’s primary anti-discrimination enforcement mechanism has produced 11 enforceable outcomes in employment cases. Given that survey data suggests approximately 12 percent of Georgian workers have experienced discrimination at work in the past two years — a figure consistent with international comparisons for transition economies — the gap between the scale of the problem and the enforcement response is vast.
The reasons for low enforcement are structural rather than simply resource-related. The Defender’s recommendations are non-binding: employers can ignore them without penalty unless the Defender proceeds to court, a process that takes 18–36 months and absorbs disproportionate institutional capacity for any single case. The burden of proof on complainants is relatively high — unlike in EU member states that have implemented the burden-shifting provisions of the Equal Treatment Directives. And the limitation periods for filing complaints (one year from the discriminatory act) are short relative to the typical duration of discriminatory employment relationships, which often manifest over extended periods rather than as single identifiable incidents.
The EU’s proposed Platform Work Directive and updated equality enforcement framework, which Georgia will need to align with in the accession process, include mandatory burden-shifting in discrimination cases and increased penalties for non-compliance. These provisions, if transposed into Georgian law, would substantially improve the enforcement landscape.
GILS Position: The 2014 law created the legal architecture. Ten years of under-enforcement have established a pattern that needs to be broken through legislative reform. GILS recommends introduction of a shared burden of proof in employment discrimination cases (as per EU Directive 2006/54/EC), mandatory publication of enforcement outcomes by the Public Defender’s Office on a quarterly basis, and a doubling of the Office’s investigative staffing for employment cases within the 2025 budget cycle.
Ten years of a law that is rarely enforced is not ten years of progress. It is ten years of unrealised potential.
Read the full GILS analysis: https://labour.edu.ge/law-anti-discrimination/