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The Constitutional and Legal Policy Institute (COLPI) within its Program on National Minorities in partnership with the Caucasian Institute of Peace, Democracy and Development conducted an Advocacy and Rights Training Seminar on Public Participation of National and Ethnic Minorities in Tbilisi, Georgia, on 23-28 of July 2000.
The goal of the seminar was to bring together presentatives of minorities NGOs from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, North Caucasus, as well as local and international experts in the field of minority rights protection. The seminar covered the topics of political and rights-based approach to public participation, forms of political participation and autonomy, methods to achieve political participation, examples from various countries and regions including
problems and achievements, methods of representation in various states and political and lobbying strategies available, international advocacy opportunities through OSCE, CoE and UN, relevant instruments, procedures, enforcement mechanisms, relevance to domestic legislation
and bilateral treaties, advocacy and lobbying strategies, and litigation.
Along with these topics, round-tables were conducted by the local experts on: monitoring, sharing experiences of the network of NGOs in the sphere of national minorities in the Caucasian region, effective strategies for lobbying for improvements, induvidual vs. collective right of national minorities, implications for legislative activities,
and local legislation on national minorities and its realization, possibilities to enter the international fora.
The trainers were:
Maria Lundberg, Norwegian Institute of Human Rights
Boris Tsilevich, MINELRES, and Member of Latvian Parliament
Alan Phillips, Minority Rights Group International (MRGI), Director
Anna-Mria Br, MRG Project Manager in Central and Eastern Europe
Henrikas Mickevichus, COLPI Consultant
The local experts were:
Paata Zakareishvili, Georgia, The Caucasian Institute of Peace, Democracy and Development
Ivliyan Haindrava, Georgia, Center of Development and Cooperation, Center for Pluralism
Alexander Rusetsky, Georgia, Georgian Committee of Helsinki Citizens Assembly
Irina Gasparyan, Armenia, Director of National NGOs Association
Nadir Kamaldinov, Azerbaijan, Resource Center on National Minorities
Repesentatives of more than 40 NGOs from the Caucasus took part in the seminar, among them were umbrella organizations for many national minority organizations in separate countries, such as All-Citizens Movement Multinational Georgia (Georgia), Resource Center on National
Minorities (Azerbaijan), National NGOs Association (Armenia).
The participants highly appreciated the possibility for sharing experiences and receiving relevant training, as well as actually meeting or getting to know each other. Although at the beginning there was a tendency to very carefully word the state of the problems on the side of Armenia and Azerbaijan delegations, the seminar grew
into a constructive discussion of common for the region of the South Caucasus problems and seeking the best strategies for improvements.
During the seminar it was also clearly seen that represented NGOs were working on different levels: some on local, some on state and regional level. Based on this, the participants came up with several options for the follow-up activities varying from local and country
initiatives to facilitate alike trainings in the places of compact settlements of national minorities to a region comprising initiative of providing training to representatives of the 3 South Caucasus countries, who then would be enabled to do such training in the regions using acquired international expertise and deep knowledge of
region peculiarities.
The seminar provided good grounds for keeping the network and exchanging information among the participants as well as enabled them to further communicate with the international experts and access related information sources and list-serves.
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