Ombudsman Declares Police Makes “Ineffective Response” to Domestic Violence
By Tea Mariamidze
Tuesday, January 9
(TBILISI)--Georgia’s Public Defender Nino Lomjaria has addressed the Ministry of Interior Affairs (MIA) of Georgia with the recommendation to respond more effectively to the domestic violence cases in the country.
The Ombudsman considers it necessary to establish the monitoring system of restraining and protection orders to ensure their effective enforcement.
Lomjaria says a risk assessment guideline on cases of domestic violence and individual action plans for each case should be set up.
Moreover, the Ombudsman says that each call to 112 over domestic violence should be analysed in order to effectively solve them.
The statement reads that Lomjaria studied several cases of attempted murder of women or driving victims to suicide, adding that the police was informed about the dangers, but they were unable to prevent repeated cases of violence.
“The study revealed that a reaction pattern of the law enforcement agencies to domestic violence cases is often inconsistent, which consequently fails to protect the victims,” she said.
Last month, Lomjaria also spoke about “alarming” statistics of femicide in 2017 – 22 cases in 9 months. She stressed the number of attempted murders was also high. Eight cases out of 11 observed were identified as domestic violence.
The MIA reports that while more and more victims address the police, a number of domestic violence cases has not decreased. The Interior Ministry issued 3,921 restrictive orders on domestic violence in 2017.
The data of restrictive orders since 2013 is as follows: 2013 – 227 orders, 2014 – 817, 2015 – 2.598, 2016 – 2.877 and 2017 [December] – 3.921.
