What legal status is granted to the various religious confessions in Georgia? What is the position of the acting religious confessions in Georgia with regard to their status? And finally, what are the OSCE recommendations to analyze the law on religion and faith? To answer these questions, the Union XXI Century organized a meeting of the representatives of the Armenian Orthodox Apostolic Church, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, the Muslim Department in the South Caucasus and other religious unions in the Public Defender’s Office.

The discussion on “the Status of Religious Unions in Georgia” was organized in the framework of the project with the financial support of the Foundation “Open Society – Georgia.” The name of the project is “For the Protection of Freedom of Faith and Confession in Georgia” whose main goal is to create a general picture of the legal situation and analyze of free confession in Georgian law.

The only religious organization in Georgia with the status of legal entity is the Orthodox Church. Georgian law grants the status of non-profit legal entity to other religious unions. The concept of the non-profit legal entity consumes several sorts of organizations: non-governmental, charity and religious organizations.

Babutsa Pataraia from the department of international public law at the Ministry of Justice said that the definition of religious organizations was created in order to cancel the past discomfort in regard with the status of “union” and “foundation”. According to the Tax Code of Georgia, an organization- which carries out religious activities- is taxed in different ways, which include some tax advantages. For example, in the context of religious activities, the production of ritual requisite is completely free from tax.

At the meeting, Paata Gachechiladze (Union XXI Century) spoke about the history of legal status; lawyer Zakaria Kutsnashvili discussed the legal details of the status.

Sergo Namoradze, representative of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church believes that “although the status is not completely acceptable for me, we had to get registered with this status. Very often, when we apply to the Tax Department, they get confused because they do not have concrete regulations with regard to us. The state recognizes only one confession to be the state religion. The same situation exists in society. The status reflects the real situation in society.”

Sergo Namoradze, together with other participants of the meeting, spoke about so-called written and unwritten laws which the religious unions deal with when implementing their religious activities. Lack of status might hinder religious unions’ ability to carry out any educational activities as well as its cooperation with the penitentiary department. Mola Vagiph from the South Caucasus Muslim Department said they had to ask permission from the clergymen of the Orthodox Church to enter the detention settings.

Representatives of other confessions agreed that historically, the Orthodox Church had particular privilege in Georgia but they do not consider the granting the status of non-profit legal entity to other religious unions as panacea. The past experience also increases their doubts: “Before Concordat between the State of Georgia and the Orthodox Church was signed, the situation was the same and unfair. Now this situation has been legalized. In the past we were told “we do not care, it should be in this way,” but now they tell us “here it is the Concordat.” The problem is not only in the agreement but the point is that somebody received a bigger portion of rights while others still have no rights at all,” said Sergo Namoradze.

The participants of the Round Table concluded that current legislation is often misinterpreted in practice. Malkhaz Saldadze, project consultant from the Foundation “Open Society –Georgia” said: “It will be very interesting to work out recommendations based on the opinions of the representatives of various religious confessions. Amendments might be necessary in the legislation in order to encourage non-orthodox confessions to be on equal ground. As it was clarified here, status does not make any difference in the written law. The practice demonstrates a completely different situation. It will be interesting to see how the practice can be changed with the new legislation initiatives and how those initiatives can be supported by civil society and religious confessions.”
 
Nino Dzandzava, netgazeti.ge,

16.02.2011 / http://religiebi.info/index.php?a=main&pid=18&lang=eng