The obligations connected with military reserve service are not always to be performed immediately: the law provides both for exemption from mobilization reserve service and for the deferral of its completion. For a reservist and his family they are an important safety instrument, but their use requires precise legal assessment and documentary substantiation.
We explain who is exempted, who receives a deferral and how these rights are exercised; below is the complete classification of statutory grounds.
Exemption from Mobilization Reserve Service
Under the law, the following are exempted from mobilization reserve service:
- a woman who has no military-accounting specialty;
- a person deemed unfit for military service due to his state of health;
- a person who has reached the age of 60.
Exemption means that these persons are not considered obliged to perform mobilization reserve service at all; exemption on health grounds rests on a finding of unfitness, formalized in the appropriate manner — it is on that document that the status changes.
Grounds for Deferral: Family Circumstances
The completion of mobilization reserve service is deferred for a person whose care involves an incapable-of-work family member — a parent, spouse, child, stepchild or another person permanently living with him — or a minor needing permanent care who has no other legal representative or other person provided for by law who is obliged and able to look after him. Its use requires substantiating that the care falls precisely on this person and that no alternative exists.
Grounds for Deferral: Elections, Activity and Health
The law provides further grounds of deferral:
- a person registered, on the day of call-up to the mobilization reserve, as a candidate for membership of the Parliament or the presidency of Georgia, the supreme representative body of an autonomous republic or the representative body of a municipality, or for mayor of a municipality — until the official publication of the final results of the respective elections;
- a person whose activity is connected with the harvesting of agricultural crops — where the specificity so requires and this person is the family's only adult and able-bodied member;
- a person deemed temporarily unfit for military service due to his state of health.
The election-related ground lasts until the official publication of the final results; the harvest-related ground depends on the specificity of the agricultural activity; and temporary unfitness rests on a medical conclusion whose force expires with time.