Open Society Georgia Foundation and the Ministry of Interior of Georgia have signed a memorandum of understanding. The memorandum enables implementation of OSGF Human Rights Program in-house project – Inside Policy Custody, developed jointly with Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) and Legal Aid Reformers’ Network (LARN)
The aforementioned project aims to enhance suspects rights in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. The project uses a unique set of tools to gather empirical data about what really happens in the daily practice of police stations. The project will examine what really happens to suspects within very first days and hours of arrest? What role do lawyers actually play during this time? Are suspects really able to exercise the rights they are meant to have in practice? The research is focused on the right to information, the right of access to a lawyer, the right to silence, and on the right to medical assistance.
The focus of the research is to directly observe criminal justice practitioners as they go about their daily, routine work. By locating researchers in police stations and by accompanying lawyers in their daily work, we will be able to observe and better understand the implementation of suspect’s rights from multiple perspectives. These direct observations are followed up with targeted interviews of police, lawyers, and potentially detainees, to gain deeper insight into practical constraints upon working practices, and with suspects to better understand their actual experiences in the criminal justice system.
The major objective of the research is to observe and measure the practical operation of suspects’ rights in reality. The research seeks to identify best practices as observed in the field, and to understand the constraints that operate on the daily routines of police and lawyers, as well as the drivers for certain forms of behaviour in the delivery of rights – be they embedded within the imperatives of the criminal justice system, or the professional cultures of legal actors themselves.
The core outcome of the research will be a Country Report on Georgia, tailored for a national audience and targeted towards national reform. The report will present the findings of the research and provide clear conclusions and recommendations for Georgia. In order to best use the information available from both this three-country study, the reports will also contain some comparative data such as examples of good practice and reforms from the other countries.
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