The government program envisages development of advocacy, notary and arbitrage sectors, MP from “My Step” Party Arthur Davtyan directed a question to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who was presenting the Government Program on 12 February.

“Please tell us what means and measures the government provides for their development,” the MP asked.

According to Nikol Pashinyan, the government attaches great importance to alternative mechanisms and ways of dispute resolutions in the judiciary system reforms.

“The functioning of the judiciary today creates a lot of problems for the economy as well. Today, just at this moment, there are 300 billion AMD in Armenia, which belong to no one, because of its being involved in the legal process, that is to say, that money is in a debate and that people are debating about whose that 300 billion AMD is,” Nikol Pashinyan said.

According to him this was the reason of attaching great importance to arbitration and mechanisms for alternative solutions.

Referring to the advocacy activities, the Prime Minister mentioned: “Naturally if the court system is free and independent, the dispute resolution mechanisms are fair, it will lead to the development of advocacy. I disagree with the idea that every professional group thinks it should be a class that should not pay taxes. You are asking about the shadow. For example, Do you know whether there is shadow in the attorney’s business or not. Of course there is a huge shadow. Let’s refer to Datalex and we’ll see that there are attorneys who have 100 cases. Let us see how much income that advocate has shown. Has he/she shown the income of those 100 cases or not? However, since advocates are organized people and love to defend themselves, they are protecting themselves from any legislative change. But let me say that we have another problem, we do not have an effective mechanism to record these revenues and evaluate and manage the shadow. We invite not only lawyers but also the representatives of other layers of the society to the dialogue on this topic. We are not the enemy of anybody and we do not have the problem of “hitting” anyone.  We have a common objective to solve our problems with shared efforts,” Nikol Pashinyan said.