It Takes Armenia’s Parliament Half Hour to Consider and Pass Bills, Opposition MP Says

At the 8th session of the Armenian National Assembly's fifth convocation, more bills were passed during extraordinary sittings than they were during regular four-day sittings; moreover, laws are usually adopted in half an hour so that no one is able to properly examine or challenge them, opposition Armenian National Congress (ANC) party parliamentary faction secretary Aram Manukyan said to reporters Thursday, citing the results of the latest monitoring of the parliament's work.

According to official figures published on the Parliament Monitoring website, 90 out of 112 laws were adopted by the parliament in extraordinary sittings which, as stated by Manukyan, is a “specially designed secret adoption mechanism.”

“This swift adoption of laws gives no one a chance to properly study them. It should normally take more than a month to carefully consider and discuss bills, not the current one and a half hour,” the lawmaker noted.

In past years, he added, the National Assembly discussed more laws on education and on social issues, whereas today their number has fallen sharply, and lawmakers mainly consider and pass bills of financial nature: “Our parliament has become an adjunction of the Government when it comes to passing financial-economic laws. They are able to take half a billion dollars in credit within a few hours. In the last few months, [the National Assembly] has already discussed and verified 14 international loan agreements.”