Suren Krmoyan. "The Government has been recently carrying out large scale activities to guarantee the freedom of information"

Today, Deputy Minister of Justice of the Republic of Armenia Suren Krmoyan participated in the workshop entitled "Freedom of information in Armenia: 16 years of experience". The event was held by the Freedom of Information Centre of Armenia in collaboration with the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Armenia, with the assistance of UNESCO. Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia Lena Nazaryan, President of the Freedom of Information Centre of Armenia Shushan Doydoyan, international expert, Executive Director of the Centre for Law and Democracy Toby Mendel and others participated in the meeting as well.

Suren Krmoyan welcomed the colleagues and noted that the meeting is a good occasion to analyse the achievements and the problems of the past period in the field of the freedom of information, to identify the gaps and record progress. According to S. Krmoyan, it is no coincidence that both in the entire world and in Armenia, freedom of information has become a constitutional and conventional right, and the availability of this freedom — an important indicator of a democratic society. The Deputy Minister also emphasised that the freedom of information is important and valued in the sense that the right to receive information is the tool through which citizens participate in the activities of the state and local self-government bodies, participate in the public governance.

"Freedom of information is the tool through which the citizen works and creates welfare for himself or herself, it is also the tool through which the citizen has the opportunity to fight against unfairness, corruption, as well as violation of the principle of legal equality. Freedom of information is a prerequisite for the welfare and a guarantee for exercising other human rights," — Deputy Minister Krmoyan specified. Within the same context, the Deputy Minister of Justice said that any effort made by anyone aimed at sustaining freedom of information deserves high appreciation and that the Ministry of Justice and all the other state bodies perform day-to-day work aimed at guaranteeing human rights in the field of freedom of information, providing the information requested by people.

Deputy Minister also emphasised that recently the Government has been carrying out wide-scale activities to guarantee the freedom of information, to create effective mechanisms for exercising person’s rights to information. As an example Suren Krmoyan presented the recently launched unified website for electronic requests at www.e-request.am, which enables not only to send a request to all state bodies, but also reduce the costs to be incurred by citizens and state bodies in this process, to control the time periods for responding to the requests, receive, through feedback, the opinions of citizens on the services rendered and collect statistics.

Concluding his speech, Suren Krmoyan noted that the efforts of the State would not be sufficient without the activeness of the civil society and international organisations. S. Krmoyan also expressed his gratitude to Freedom of Information Centre and Shushan Doydoyan for being one of the pioneers of the freedom of information law.

The workshop was followed by a discussion with those responsible for the civil society and the field of freedom of information, as well as employees of state bodies.