Baia Pataraia (Georgian: ბაია პატარაია; born 1982) is a leading feminist activist and human rights lawyer in Georgia. She is the director of the women's rights organization Sapari.
Baia Pataraia was born in Tbilisi in 1982.[1][2]
She studied international law and economics at Tbilisi State University, graduating in 2004, then obtained a master's degree in human rights law from Central European University in Hungary in 2006.[1][2][3]
Beginning in 2008, Pataraia became a visiting lecturer at Tbilisi State University and the Free University of Tbilisi.[1][3] She worked in the Ministry of Justice of Georgia from 2009 to 2013.[1][2][4] While there, she helped draft the new law Article 126, which formally defined the crime of domestic violence in Georgia.[2][4][5] Her work also included ensuring that sexual harassment was covered by the Law on Gender Equality. She eventually left government to focus on activism full-time.[2]
While working to help rehabilitate torture victims in 2007, she was recruited by the feminist activist Natalia Zazashvili to join Sapari, a nascent human rights organization in Georgia. Sapari initially focused on helping women facing domestic violence.[2][3] She would go on to become the organization's director, and its mission would expand to include fighting for women's political empowerment and against discrimination.[1][3][4][6]
Pataraia has been heavily involved as a leader in her country's feminist movement since 2012, when she began organizing with the Independent Group of Feminists.[1][2][3][6][7] By her own account, early activists in Georgia did not explicitly describe themselves as "feminists," but that changed in the early 2010s.[2] In 2014, she led a national campaign against femicide in response to an apparent spike in domestic violence.[4] She is also the chair of Human Rights House Tbilisi and the founder of the semi-formal Georgian Women’s Movement.[4][8]
Critics have questioned Pataraia's independence as an activist due to her prior work in the federal government, but she argues this experience has made her a more effective advocate. She has also been the target of death threats and street harassment for her work.[4]