CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Isaac, Ian |
|---|---|
| Title | LGBTI Hate Crimes in the Republic of Georgia: Continuing Struggles Despite Reform |
| Summary | Despite Georgia’s notable legislative and institutional steps to identify, investigate, and prosecute sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI)-motivated hate crimes within the last ten years, the state still fails to tackle the foundational problem of entrenched homophobic attitudes in civil society and law enforcement. While Georgia claims its recent reforms have resulted in a higher rate of identifying SOGI-motivated hate crimes, LGBTI NGOs report that progress has been modest at best, and state data underrepresents the discouraging scope of the problem. LGBTI people significantly under-report hate crimes due to lack of trust in the criminal justice system, as well as substantiated fears of outing, discrimination, and re-victimization from law enforcement. Furthermore, even if law enforcement officials initiate investigations into alleged hate crimes in the first place, they often fail to assign hate-motivated bias to the perpetrator. Most often, investigations into SOGI-motivated hate crimes lack due diligence — victims are not interviewed, video footage is left unexamined, and perpetrators are not identified. Consequently, Georgia’s national non-discrimination protection laws lack proper implementation, and outcomes are less than satisfactory for LGBTI survivors of hate crimes. In this capstone project, I will account for Georgia’s recent legal and policy reforms to combat SOGI-motivated hate crimes and argue that while many of these initiatives are to be commended, more interventions are required to protect LGBTI people from violence and ensure access to justice. |
| Supervisor | Polgari, Eszter |
| Department | Legal Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/isaac_ian.pdf |
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