The Legal Basis of the Relationship with Volunteers
Volunteering is not regulated by a separate statute in Georgia: there is no special law on volunteers, and the relationship between an organisation and a volunteer therefore rests legally on the general constructions of the Civil Code — above all, the mandate contract performed gratuitously. The framework is flexible: under Article 319 of the Code, subjects of private law are free, within the limits of the law, to conclude contracts and to determine their content, and they may conclude contracts that are not provided for by law but do not contradict it. The volunteer agreement is built precisely on that freedom: it is neither an employment contract nor any mandatory statutory form — it is drafted on the model of a mandate contract, without remuneration. What the freedom does not remove is the need for precision: because no ready-made statutory form exists, everything the parties do not write into the agreement will be filled by the default rules of the Code, and those defaults are not always what a volunteer programme intends.
The Mandate Model and Gratuitousness
Article 709 defines the contract: under a mandate contract, the mandatary is obliged to perform for the mandator one or more acts entrusted to him, in the name and at the expense of the mandator. In the volunteer setting this means that the organisation (the mandator) entrusts defined activities to the volunteer (the mandatary), and the volunteer acts in the organisation's name and at its expense. Remuneration is governed by Article 710: the mandator is obliged to pay the mandatary remuneration only in the cases provided for by the contract or by law; remuneration is deemed tacitly agreed where, according to the circumstances, the performance of the act is expected only against remuneration; and where the amount is not determined, a customary remuneration is deemed agreed — or a scale-based one where a scale exists. For a volunteer agreement this is the decisive point: if the contract provides no remuneration and the circumstances do not point to payment, the relationship remains gratuitous — and that status should be expressed explicitly in the agreement, so that no presumption of payment arises later.