Epress.am News from Armenia
In 2003, the United Nations declared Dec. 9 as the International Day on the Fight against Corruption. With this in mind, the Armenian branch of the Transparency International Anti-Corruption Center issued a statement today on the state of corruption in Armenia.
In 2011, the Government of Armenian continued to adopt legislative and sub-legislative anti-corruption acts; in particular, the new Law on Procurement or the Law on Public Service.
“Several other laws and decrees have been also adopted to implement the requirements of the national Anti-Corruption Strategy and its 2009-2012 Action Plan, as well as to meet its international anti-corruption obligations. Incidents of corruption were also disclosed. For example, the Chamber of Control of the Republic of Armenia uncovered incidents of corruption in different sectors. In 2011, law enforcement bodies continued to regularly expose corruption crimes and arrest public officials, in some cases, even high-ranking ones. The leaders of several opposition parties continued to point to the huge scales of corruption in the country.
“However, despite this, the perceptions of local and international experts, as well as those of ordinary citizens, remained unchanged. And, according to those perceptions, corruption in Armenia continues to remain widespread and is systemic by nature. The results of studies carried out by reputable international organizations, in particular, the values of the Transparency International’s (TI) 2011 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) and CPI ranking table, published on Dec. 1, 2011, also indicate this fact. From year to year, Armenia’s position drops in this ranking table (this year it went down by 6 places), letting it be bypassed by such countries, which only several years ago were at much worse positions than Armenia. The results of a corruption perception survey conducted by the Armenian Office of the Caucasus Research Resources Centers (CRRC-Armenia) in 2010 and published this year are also alarming. In particular, in 2010, 65% of the respondents thought that corruption was the reality of our life. It should be mentioned that this number gradually increased from year to year. In 2008, the same survey conducted by the same organization indicated that only 51% of the respondents gave such answer, and in 2009, 59%,” reads the Transparency International statement.
Summarizing the above, the corruption watchdog notes: “And because 2011 did not witness positive change in tackling corruption, we are left only to fix the current dilemma in this area, which will make our nation’s dream to have a prosperous, affluent and democratic country even more unreachable.”
Updated 2:39 pm: Last paragraph added.