Marriage must be defined in Constitution
By Gvantsa Gabekhadze
Tuesday, February 14
The head of Parliament’s Human Rights Committee from the ruling Georgian Dream coalition says her team “must keep” its election promise and define the meaning of marriage in the Constitution, which is currently being amended.
“In the election period, we promised the people that marriage would be defined in the Constitution as the union of a man and a woman. We must keep this promise,” Sopho Kiladze stated.
A member of the European Georgia opposition party, ex-Public Defender Giorgi Tughushi, claims that marriage is already defined in the country’s legislation and the ruling team’s consistent push of the issue is only of a “populist nature”.
Tughushi says that through speculation over such topics, the government is trying to shift the public’s attention onto less important issues.
In March 2014, then-Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili proposed to define the term "family” as the "union of a man and a woman” in the Georgian Constitution.
He addressed this proposal to the Constitutional Commission and said that Georgian legislation already has such a definition, in which PM Garibashvili was probably speaking about the definition of marriage, since the Georgian Constitution does not say anything about family.
An article in the Georgian Civil Code said "marriage is the voluntary union of a man and woman with the aim of starting a family”.
Now the state Constitutional Commission working on the amendments to the country’s main law is very likely to discuss the marriage issue, the majority says.
The Commission should provide the constitutional amendments before April 30 this year.
