A working meeting on sexual harassment awareness was held for representatives of the Central Election Commission (CEC). Giorgi Kalandarishvili, Chairperson of CEC, and Tamar Sabedashvili, Deputy Country Representative, UN Women Georgia, made opening remarks at the meeting. As Giorgi Kalandarishvili noted, the goal was CEC employees' capacity development to promote an effective sexual harassment response mechanism and a gender-sensitive work environment.

“Georgian election administration is one of the agencies that ensured the adoption of sexual harassment prevention mechanisms and determination of relevant policies. In close cooperation with UN Women, information-education meetings were planned for employees of election administration to ensure their awareness raising on the matter and effective implementation of preventive mechanisms against sexual harassment”, CEC Chairperson said.

As Tamar Sabedashvili, Deputy Country Representative, UN Women Georgia said at the meeting: “Central Election Commission adopted sexual harassment prevention and regulation mechanism, and within the framework of today’s meeting, we discuss the phenomenon of workplace sexual harassment to commission members, Gender Equality Council members and other colleagues, prevention of such cases as well as how should internal institutional response to such cases be improved".

Representatives of the CEC Gender Council, including CEC members, heads of structural units and Training Centre director participated in today's working meeting. Thematic meetings for district election commissions (DECs) representatives and ToT in this regard are planned. 

The working meeting was organized today by the UN Women and the CEC with the support of the Norwegian Government.