Epress.am News from Armenia
Armenia’s fifth convocation National Assembly almost completely handed over its main legislative function to the Government; it also failed to implement its function of overseeing the operations of other state institutions. In the past 5 years, 92% of the 1078 adopted laws were government-initiated, while the NA only voted to pass them, according to the final report by the Parliament Monitoring project.
Lusine Vasilyan, in charge of the project, said during the presentation of the report that the weakening role of the parliament as a legislative body is also evidenced by the fact that exactly half of the laws were passed in extraordinary sessions convened by the government. “If in case with the parliament of the fourth convocation there were 196 special order bills, in the fifth one there were 645 – four times more,” Vasilyan stated.
According to the project manager, at extraordinary sessions, the parliament does not tend to comprehensively discuss the government-initiated bills but passes them as quickly as possible within 24 hours. At the same time, bills introduced by opposition forces often do not get discussed at all: the fifth convocation refused to include 58 opposition-initiated bills in its agenda.
The adopted laws, Vasilyan went on, mainly concerned the state-legal and administrative fields; the Code on Administrative Offences, for instance, was changed 40 times; “It is noteworthy that the laws that underwent insignificant changes coincide with the fields that the government considers a priority. The law on foreign investment, for example, was last changed 10 years ago.”
According to Gor Abrahamyan, an expert with the NA Monitoring project, the parliament also did not exercise its control function; “The NA failed to discuss the Control Chamber activity programs in due time. Which is even more absurd, the parliament did not hold any discussions on the General Prosecutor’s and the Human Rights Ombudsman’s 2016 reports.”