This document introduces the recommendations by the Transparency International Anticorruption Center (TIAC) to the Republic of Armenia National Assembly and the Government with a purpose to launch effective fight against corruption and to record success.

Changes expected as a result of the fight against corruption

Since 2003, the Republic of Armenia has announced “fight against corruption” while joining a number of international treaties and networks, developing and implementing three Anticorruption strategies and hundreds of actions. However, according to the indices and indicators of the international organizations and the data of domestic surveys or observations, corruption has not reduced in our country.

The spring of 2018 was marked with revolution in Armenia, the driving force of which was the strive and thirst of citizens for justice, and their accumulated complaint towards the corrupt and arrogant authorities. The result of the snap elections to the Yerevan City council in September and snap elections to the Parliament in December of the same year, in addition to the sociological survey data, showed the trust of the overwhelming majority of the citizens towards the political power leading the revolution, thus also ensuring their expectations from the given power – to establish justice in Armenia, including eradication of corruption.

However, under conditions of complete absence of the political will to eliminate corruption, the former government initiated numerous steps in this direction through implementing a number of events and recording certain progress, in particular, in terms of creating grounds for the Anticorruption policy. Needless to say, that the expectations from the new authority are incomparably bigger, and therefore its Anticorruption program should be more ambitious and large-scale.

The fight against corruption by the new government should set a goal – to achieve the following changes in the next five years:

  1. ensuring large-scale engagement of citizens and institutions in fight against corruption,
  2. zero tolerance for corruption,
  3. creating transparency and accountability mechanisms at all the levels of the governance,
  4. maximal restriction of opportunities for discretionary decisions in all the branches of the authorities, and strengthening of supervision,
  5. ensuring proper resources, capacity and toolkit for the authorized institutions to prevent and disclose corruption,
  6. inevitability of punishing corrupt people.

These changes will safeguard improvement of various indices and indicators of corruption perception.

See TIAC website for Anticorruption Agenda for Armenia

AC-agenda-for-Armenia