Social Justice Center in cooperation with East West Management Institute (EWMI)’s program “Promoting Rule of Law in Georgia” (PROLoG), has commenced a project titled: “Improving Human Rights Conditions for Marginalized Groups through Strategic Litigation”.

The challenges faced by religious and ethnic minorities in Georgia on the one hand is connected to the unequal treatment on institutional and legislative levels, and on the other hand, to the discriminative social and political environment. Taking this into consideration, project goal is to support rights protection of non-dominant religious groups, through complex and intersectional strategic litigation, field work, advocacy and awareness raising.

To meet the mentioned goal, projects sets following objectives:

• Strengthen rights protection of religious and ethnic minority groups through strategic litigation before relevant regional, national and international courts;
• Improve rights conditions of religious minorities living in mountainous Adjara via field visits and mobile legal clinic work.

In order to address the problem and achieve the above-stated objectives, following strategies will be adopted:

• Proactive Approach - The concept of EMC’s strategic litigation means intensive, proactive communication with beneficiaries and field visits for the purpose of identifying problems and later on, plan court cases for solving these problems. According to our approach, the project team goes to beneficiaries and does not wait till beneficiaries address to Social Justice Center.
• Strategic litigation based on needs - For effective litigation, it is very important to identify local community needs and plan strategic litigation in order to improve human rights situation of local communities.
• Confidence building in local community and increasing trust in legal remedies – this approach will be actively applied within the work of mobile clinics and legal consultations in Adjara, where we will endeavor to response community broader needs and challenges. With such attitude we are planning to spread our legal interventions in relation to the cases of high social interest, which may not be strictly related to the religious discrimination.

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