The Concordat and the Church's Place in the State

The constitutional agreement signed between the Georgian state and the Orthodox Church in 2002 is the document that defines religion in Georgia. It recognises the church's special role in the country's history, exempts it from certain taxes, grants the Patriarch immunity, gives the church ownership of churches and monasteries not currently in use along with the land they stand on, requires state consultation on education, and provides state compensation for damage suffered under Soviet rule.

No other religious body has anything comparable. Until 2011 minority faiths could not register as legal entities at all, and a change that year allowing registration as legal entities of public law was itself contested by the church. The practical consequences fall on the same groups repeatedly. Armenian Apostolic and Catholic communities have unresolved claims to churches transferred to the Orthodox Church during the Soviet period; Muslim communities in Adjara have faced obstruction over mosque construction in Batumi and elsewhere; and a series of violent incidents against Jehovah's Witnesses in the late 1990s and early 2000s, led by a defrocked priest, went largely unpunished until the European Court of Human Rights found against Georgia in 2007. Georgia is at the same time one of the more genuinely tolerant societies in the region by long practice, with an ancient Jewish community that reports almost no history of persecution, which is the tension worth holding.