Anti-harassment mechanisms in Georgia are no longer a private company's goodwill initiative — their legal foundation is defined by Articles 4, 45, 23 and 78 of the Labour Code: which conduct must be prohibited, what environment must be created, where the complaint route must be written down and what inaction costs. Foreign mandatory risk-assessment models are not reflected in the Georgian statute — the architecture of prevention is created entirely by the Georgian Labour Code.
Which conduct is being prevented
Prevention mechanisms target precisely the conduct defined in Article 4 of the Code. Workplace harassment, including sexual harassment, is a form of discrimination — unwanted conduct conditioned on a protected ground that aims at or causes an infringement of dignity and creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading or offensive environment. Sexual harassment is defined separately as unwanted conduct of a sexual nature with the same result. The first task of prevention is to operationalise these definitions: internal documents must describe this conduct with concrete examples so that every employee recognises the prohibited boundary.
The environment and information duties
Article 45 of the Code creates the substantive foundation of prevention: the employer is obliged to ensure a working environment that is maximally safe and healthy for the employee's life and health — and a healthy environment includes one in which harassment does not occur. Under the same article the employer is obliged to supply the employee, within a reasonable period, with complete, objective and comprehensible information on every factor affecting the employee's life and health. In prevention practice this means: information about what harassment is, how the organisation responds and who the contact person is — this is part of the statutory information duty.
The home of the complaint route — the internal rules
Article 23 of the Code gives the prevention mechanisms their instrument: the internal labour rules are a written document by which the procedure for reviewing an application or complaint may be defined. It is this item that is the home of the complaint channel: who receives the application, within what period it is reviewed, how the outcome is recorded and how the complainant's confidentiality is protected — all of this must be written into the internal rules. Under the same article the employer is obliged to reflect anti-discrimination provisions in the internal rules and other documents and to ensure their performance — this is the documentary backbone of the preventive system.