Meeting of Interreligious Council.
The ordinary sitting of Interreligious Council was held on February 9, 2016. Representatives of Georgian Orthodox Church, Armenian Apostolic Church, Roman Catholic Church, Evangelic Baptist Church, Evangelic Lutheran Church, Georgia Muslim Department and Yazidi Community participated in the sitting. The agenda included the following three topics:
- Information on the public school discipline – “Me and the Society”.
- Draft amendments against blasphemy to the Administrative Offences Code of Georgia.
- Claim submitted by Citizen of Georgia Tatishvili to the Constitutional Court requesting that the part of Article 1106 of the Civil Code of Georgia be recognized unconstitutional.
Father Andria Jagmaidze spoke on the first topic of the agenda, presented respective materials and shortly reviewed related problems.
It was decided that representatives of religious unions would have studied appropriate materials and presented their viewpoints and after that to plan the meeting with the officials of the Ministry of Education of Georgia.
With regard to the draft law against blasphemy, it was mentioned that there was a conflict between the freedom of belief and freedom of expression in the country; however, initiated version of the draft law was considered unacceptable. Religious unions objected to support it.
As for the claim submitted to the Constitutional Court, religious unions took decision to develop and publicize respective statement in the near future in order to express the attitudes of religious unions to the legal definition of marriage and same-sex marriage.