Goal: People’s property rights are fully respected and protected by the government and citizens are properly compensated when giving up their land for public projects. 

TI Georgia will: 

● Open one free legal consultation center in Zugdidi focusing on property rights issues.

● Empower people by providing tools, information and assistance to protect their property rights.  

●  Write analytical blogs, reports, interviews, articles,  at least one per month, studying the current situation and highlighting relevant issues in the field of property rights. Journalists and active citizens from all around the country will be invited to be guest blog authors.

● Provide three intensive blog writing trainings for 35 journalists, activists and relevant stakeholders. TI Georgia’s representative will be in charge of coordinating and finalizing blog posts together with the involved regional activist/journalist. These stories about property rights will be released as a joint product of TI Georgia and relevant media outlet/organization or individual.

●  In cooperation with newspapers in the regions, TI Georgia will launch a regular Advice Column. Readers will be able to ask questions about property rights issues and will receive competent answers to the questions they have. Questions will be identified/collected from the readers by the journalists of these newspapers and forwarded to the organization. If TI Georgia’s competence and expertise will not be enough for a specific question, an expert will be invited to be a guest columnist and respond to the question on behalf of TI Georgia. 

 ●  On TI Georgia’s soon-to-be-launched website, www.propertyrights.ge, individuals will be able to electronically submit and locate on a map property rights issues they are facing. Based on the actions taken by our lawyers in response to identified problems, follow up steps will be marked on the map as well. Visitors will be able to identify what and where the main problems related to property rights are; what is the current status of each problem and whether it is solved or not. 

●   Monitor the work of the Commissions for Recognition of Rights of Ownership that are created under the local government representations (Sakrebulos) in all 73 municipalities. In this sense, TI Georgia will send FoI requests to all municipalities in order to gather statistics on how these commissions are functioning (e.g. getting statistics on how many requests were registered in each commissions and how many claims were satisfied out of total). In addition, efficiency of the commissions’ work will be monitored by sending undercover clients to each commission with specific requests. The results of the investigation will be published.

●  Analyze cases of citizens gifting property to the state, especially if several such cases are located in the same area, potentially indicating that pressure is put on individuals to give up their property. 

●  In close cooperation with TI Georgia’s Parliamentary program, relevant developments in Parliament will be tracked and TI Georgia will participate in legal drafting through providing alternative legislative proposals to the Parliament on property rights issues. In addition, TI Georgia will draft special document that will regulate resettlement issues in case of investment projects. We will draft legislative amendments according to the World Bank standards and subsequently submit them to the Parliament.