As the Venice Commission and ODIHR have noted in their 2011 Joint Opinion on the draft election code of Georgia, “although neither the Council of Europe nor OSCE require gender quotas, both recognise that legislative measures are effective mechanisms for promoting women’s participation in political and public life.” Furthermore, they referred to Article 4 of the CEDAW which emphasises that “adoption by States Parties of temporary special measures aimed at accelerating de facto equality between men and women shall not be considered discrimination.” It should be noted that measures to ensure gender-balanced representation (gender parity) in elected bodies appear more and more as an international standard3 Moreover, it must be stressed again that following the constitutional reform of 2017, there is a legal constitutional obligation to seek gender balance in public life, and that the removal of the gender quotas impinges directly on that objective. Noting women’s under-representation in the legislature and political and public life, more generally, the Venice Commission and ODIHR recommended to Georgia already in 2011, inter alia, that “the electoral system could be revised, either through the use of quotas or other recognised methods for facilitating the election of women candidates, so that current percentages of women who are elected are increased substantially; (…) Some portion of public funding for political parties could be linked to the proportion of women nominated as candidates by political parties and/or included on party lists.”