On April 4, 2016 public discussion was held in Yerevan on Open Government Partnership (OGP) initiative Independent Reporting Mechanism’s (IRM) Progress Report for Armenia. Artak Kyurumyan, OGP IRM national researcher presented IRM’s Progress Report for Armenia. Varuzhan Hoktanyan, Executive Director of Transparency International Anticorruption Center (TIAC) presented OGP developments in international level, problems and OGP applicability for Armenia. Sixty-nine countries that joined the OGP initiative demonstrated a minimum level of commitment to open government principles in four key areas (Fiscal Transparency, Access to Information, Income and Asset Disclosures, and Citizen Engagement).

Addressing the problems, Hoktanyan mentioned:

  1. How sensible is engagement of the countries that record gross violations of human rights in OGP. When human rights are violated citizen’s engagement becomes formal.
  2. How real is citizens’ participation? There is no real engagement of civil society in the implementation stage of OGP action plan, as well as in decision making issues. It is a manifestation of bad practice when the governments include the projects they implement as OGP action and attempt to get funds from donors for those projects.
  3. Independent Reporting Mechanism is carried out after the end of the first year. Whereas IRM report should be published before adoption of the action plan in order to be evaluated, and the findings of the project to be considered by the next project when it finishes.
  4. International and local Steering Committees do not act rather transparent for the public to have access to information. There are no mechanisms how state bodies consider the feedback, comments and recommendations of civil society for further implementation of OGP commitments.
  5. There is lack of financial support to civil society participants. In most of the countries donors are not seriously interested in OGP initiative.

Measures are taken for the 4 key areas to be specified in order to have proper laws and legal acts and to implement them in practice.