Youth workshop on responsibilities and the Charter

Two members of the Georgian group of the Charter - Tsisso Tchipashvili and Anastasia Zakariadze - have organized a workshop with a group of young people, the “Greening of Georgia”.

The text of the Charter has been distributed and gave rise to a very interesting discussion.

Most of these young people think that the essential for responsibility is to assume oneself’s duty honestly and to be responsible on oneself’s actions. All other types of responsibilities, to their mind, come from the abovementioned and are founded on it. Hence, the initial in this case is “I”, and no other institutional or altruistically dimension.

On the gender issues, the position of these youth must be considered as being utterly one-sided. All of them think that in the contemporary civil society there is no difference between men and women, both of them having equal responsibilities towards society and family. The young people think that not only the transnational corporations and governments assume responsibility towards the world catastrophes and global cataclysms, but also each single human-being, being at the same time a citizen of the world, shares the same responsibilities as the others.

In the meeting it was noted that all of us are responsible in soling the surroundings, and that this type of responsibility must be stimulated from the childhood and formed as a patriotic responsibility. This, to their mind, is of main importance. Each of them take part in the protection and cleaning of the environmental surroundings, each of them takes his/her own part in this activity: cleaning surroundings from plaster, rubbish, dust, sweepings, plant out saplings, economy water.

For us, it is essential that all the youth consider that the Charter is necessary and a significant document and they have fixed that this text must gain the status of liability, as the bill of human rights. The most important problem towards the Charter is that its principles must be fulfilled and shared by people and institutions, ideally by “Everybody”.

And at the same time, critical remarks were rebuked, e.g. it was noted that some items of Charter would be corrected, such as the item V. Some items and principles of Charter are very general and abstract; they need to be concreted, the more they will be concrete the better they would be understood as a necessary fulfilment in every day’s life. By increasing the degree of concreteness, the quality of effectiveness of the Charter will increase.

This workshop has been very productive and interesting.