Announcements

On April 19, 2013 Georgian Parliament passed an amendment to the Civil Code initiated by the Ministry of Education. According to this amendment “38.1 it is forbidden to change legal form of non-entrepreneur (non-commercial) legal entity in any case other than to the legal entity of public law”.

Ilia State University is a state established legal entity of private law. In 2012, on the basis of the appeal by university’s Academic Council to the State Ilia State University changed its legal form. In this case the Academic Council expressed the opinion of university’s Representative Councils, which was based on the apparent world precedent that development of universities and their transformation as a world class university is inseparably connected to autonomy and self-governance, being a subject of the private law, academic and intellectual immunity.  In our opinion, turning into the subject of private law and adoption of private property was a step towards development of the high education system in this direction.

The amendment passed by the Parliament introduces limitations to the university’s self-governance and the important part of autonomy – the right of professors, researchers and students to decide in what legal form they want to exist, in which way to develop and to be responsible about this development. If this particular amendment is voted, university will be a subject of any restriction that refer and will refer in the future to legal entity of public law: university’s autonomy and self-governance and hence development and planned success will suffer a significant damage. Therefore, we appeal to the Government and Parliament of Georgia to take into consideration all of the above-mentioned issues and to return the right to university’s professors, researchers and students to decide by themselves in which legal form they want to exist in Georgian and international legal space.