CONTACT POINT FOR ROMA AND SINTI ISSUES  : :  49 Tbilisi, 4 December 2018. Lia Gigauri (c), Deputy State Minister at the Office of the State Minister of Georgia for Reconciliation and Civic Equality, speaks at the opening of the ODIHR roundtable event on Roma access to civil registration and identity documents as Dan Pavel Doghi (l), Chief of the ODIHR Contact Point for Roma and Sinti Issues, and ODIHR consultant Levan Samadashvili (r) listen. (OSCE/Alex Oganezov) Access to personal documents for Roma and Sinti Roma and Sinti face challenges in gaining civil registration and identity documents in many parts of the OSCE region. ODIHR continued its support to the Ukrainian authorities in improving access of Roma to these documents. Following up on the work done by ODIHR in the past years in Ukraine, in March in Kyiv, 29 representatives (19 women, 10 men) of Ukrainian national and regional authorities, civil society organizations and intergovernmental organizations gathered to explore the most successful approaches to solving problems that Roma face in gaining personal documents. The expert meeting built on the recommendations of the 2017 Odesa Declaration on addressing the needs of vulnerable Roma and other communities in this field. In particular, the participants discussed the possibility of establishing a joint technical working group comprising state and non-state stakeholders to co-ordinate efforts in addressing the issue. ODIHR organized the meeting in co-operation with Ukraine’s State Migration Service, the Ministry of Justice, the Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, and UNHCR. In Georgia, ODIHR provided national and local authorities, Roma community representatives, civil society organizations and international organizations with a forum to discuss the current situation concerning Roma access to civil registration and identity documents. At a roundtable event on 4 December in Tbilisi, 35 participants (28 women, 7 men) reviewed the preliminary findings and recommendations of two ODIHR-supported background papers, discussed how lacking personal documents impacts the ability of Roma to enjoy basic rights and to benefit from public services, and identified next steps forward in addressing these issues. Statelessness and its impact on Roma and Sinti ODIHR contributed to and supported the participation of Roma civil society representatives on a study visit of a Georgian delegation to Bosnia and Herzegovina in May to exchange good practices on Roma and statelessness issues. The study visit was organized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in co-operation with the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina. The outcomes of the study visit were presented in October in Vienna at the Second Practical OSCE-UNHCR Seminar on Sharing Good Practices on Statelessness among OSCE participating  States.