On 22 March 2021, IOM organized a presentation of a newly developed chapter on migration and intercultural communication, which will be included in the Guidebook for the staff of the Service of Coordinators of Witnesses and Victims of Hate Crimes, working under the Human Rights Protection and Investigation Quality Monitoring Department  of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The Service was established under MIA in 2019 and its main responsibility is to provide support to victims and witnesses of hate crimes and to contribute to effective investigation of such crimes, which violate human rights.

The chapter was developed as a follow-up to a three-day intercultural communication training for the staff of the Service of Coordinators of Witnesses and Victims of Hate Crimes, which took place in Kachreti on 12-15 October 2020. The 2020 training gathered 16 Coordinators from Tbilisi, Batumi, Zugdidi, Ozurgeti, Kutaisi, Akhaltsikhe, Gori and Telavi and offered background information on migration and the challenges that migrants may face, tools for successful communication with vulnerable foreign migrants, conflict management techniques, trust-building approaches and useful tips on cooperation with law enforcement. In order to solidify the knowledge and provide easy reference for future staff of this Service, IOM worked to develop the migration chapter of the Coordinators’ Guidebook in close cooperation with the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Both, the training course and the migration chapter of the Guidebook were developed by Mr. Calin Rus, international expert and facilitated by Mr. Giorgi Chkheidze, national expert, under IOM’s EMERGE project, supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway.