The knowledge of the Civil Society Organizations and Mass Media are very important for systematized fight against corruption in Armenia. The Armenian Young Lawyers Association and Freedom of Information Center organized a three-day Anti-Corruption training for the CSOs and Media organizations of Syunik marz in the framework of the European Union funded “Multi-Faceted Anti-Corruption Promotion” project.
“It was planned to organize 10 anti-corruption trainings in the framework of the project in Yerevan and in the marzes. Five seminars were organized in Yerevan. This is the tenth one,” Artak Saribekyan, Executive Director of the Armenian Young Lawyers Association said․
Soon the finalized “Draft of the Republic of Armenia Anti-Corruption Strategy for 2014-2018” will be presented to the public attention. The concept on fight against corruption in the public administration sphere foresees to reserve the coordination of anti-corruption reforms and control over their implementation in Armenia to the Anti-Corruption Council and provided only 2 places in it to the CSO representatives. In the opinion of the CSO representatives that participated in the seminar, representation of the public interest by only two NGO representatives in the Council is not enough.
“I think this number is definitely not enough, and the CSOs’ involvement should be wider to organize the activities,” Edgar Hovhannisyan, representative of “Legal Society” NGO noted.
“I think this is not enough, as currently the civil society tends to the development and some definite steps have been made to ensure involvement of more than two civil society organizations in this Council.” Hrayr Khachatryan, representative of “Foundation Against the Violation of Law” MGO said.
“I think that involving only two NGOs in the Council is very little,” Lena Mushkambaryan, Assistant to Program Coordinator of “Rainbow” Leaders Educational Center said.
The schedule of the three-day training include principles of good governance, information about the notion of corruption, history of its development and reasons for its occurrences, the ways to conduct monitoring in the sphere, etc. CSO and Media Organizations, who have completed the training successfully, will have opportunity to participate in the tender for small grants to undertake monitoring, watchdog activities and journalistic investigations.
You can see the list of CSOs and the media participants of the Anti-Corruption Training here.
