Civic Initiative for the Protection of Rights of Persons recognized as Temporary Disabled was awarded the prize “CSO of the Year” for the protection of maternity rights during the Annual Award Ceremony dedicated to the International Anti-Corruption Day. Notably it was organized by the Armenian Young Lawyers Association NGO in cooperation with CSOs’ Anti-Corruption Coalition in the framework of “Multi-Faceted Anti-Corruption Promotion” project NGO funded by European Union and co-funded by the OSCE Office in Yerevan, and implemented by the Armenian Young Lawyers Association and the partner organization “Freedom of Information Centre” NGO.
The Control Chamber registered in its annual report that in 2013 women received significant pregnancy and maternity benefits. As an example they provided a fact from “Gh-Telecom” Company, where a woman received more than 30 million AMD benefits from the company and 18 million AMD reward during the last 1 year. It was also indicated that the benefits were paid to the pregnant women who were accepted to work 1 or 2 months before.
It is unknown who and to what responsibility they were called after publication of the report. However, after some time, on September 25, the Government approved the Draft on making Changes and Amendments in the RA Law on Temporary Disability Benefits,” which substantially reduced the maternity allowance and instead of 100% of the average salary the woman would receive no more than 80 % of the average salary. However, there was a group of women who were confident that under the guise of curbing corruption their social rights are violated and they were put in difficult situation, arose.
“Considering the fact that when the draft was circulated for the first time it contained controversial provisions of 40, 60, 80 proportion in the connection with the maternity leave pay. It seems to have been shifted forward aimed to control and curb certain corruption risks. If I am not mistaken the amount indicated in the Financial Ombudsman’s bulletin was circulated to show the size of the mounts. It seemed to be a little illusion,” the member of the Civic Initiative for the Protection of Rights of Persons recognized as Temporary Disabled Mane Tandilyan said.
Anna Harutyunyan, member of the initiative mentions that the benefits are paid from the taxes, which the same women pay to the State during the years of their work. Whereas the State wants to abandon its positive obligations and leave the woman alone when she is in the most vulnerable situation. “The woman plans to have a baby, and supposes that she will have fixed income during these months and she has planned this income as well. And imagine that a pregnant woman reaches December and “bang” it turns out that all her planning was in vain and her income is 5 times less than the planned. According to the initial draft the woman suffered from 5 to 7 fold.”
Women recognize that the public funds are limited and must be saved, but why the government did not remember this when doing risky and ineffective procurements.
“When the state budget is spent inefficiently, and for other purposes, there are a lot of problems… We know how the procurement process goes on, not transparently and for goods which may be purchased for cheaper price etc. That is when the budget is spent inefficiently and it does not bother anyone. The major problem is that we have a budget which is spent totally inefficiently,” Tatevik Davtyan, the member of the initiative mentions.
Members of Civic Initiative for the Protection of Rights of Persons recognized as Temporary Disabled argue that submission of such draft to the government session without conducting public hearings was unfair as well: “I would say that the main problem, if we view it from the aspect of the process, is not transparent practice. This is the second time that legislative change should have been done referring this issue and in both cases there was no preliminary efforts to involve the public were made. Even if the Government has no intention to do something secretly, but nevertheless this is not publicized, it immediately turns out that there is an intention to cover everything and to do this rapidly so that no one will know.”
Thanks to the efforts of the members of this initiative, the Government had to retreat. According to the Bill which will come into force in 2016, the working women will continue to receive maternity allowance of 100 percent of the average salary. Limitations will be applied only in case of the women whose salary exceeds 1 million AMD.
The details in the video.
The Report by Astghik Karapetyan
