EcoLur
EcoLur continues publishing articles dedicated to the human right to health and healthy environment. Reminder: “Transparency International” Anti-Corruption Center Deputy Head Sona Ayvazyan made a speech on this topic in the frames of "Republic of Armenia National Strategy on the Protection of Human Rights" organized by the "Partnership for Open Society" Initiative in Yerevan.
“The economic activities in Armenia are focused only income and impact on health, food safety and drinking water is not taken into consideration. That is, the violation of rights to healthy environment will lead to the violation of other human rights,” Sona Ayvazyan said. When EcoLur asked about participation of financial institutes in development of these processes, Sona Ayvazyan assessed their activities as extremely contradictory. “This causes concerns. On one hand, these institutes have developed standards, both environmental and social ones. And it seems that the companies should be obliged to comply with the adopted environmental and social policy. Nevertheless, on the other hand, they stimulate activities irrelevant to the adopted policy. I think the public should more actively influence on the international financial institutions as well. I think we insufficiently call them for responsibility they should bear. We don’t point out their mistakes, as they provide financial aid to the country and close eyes to erroneous actions.”
What about assessing the achievement of civic activists, Sona Ayvazyan noted, “Nothing has changed, in principle, as a result of individual actions and protests. Individual successes were due to huge energy and public resources, which was spent on the solution to a small task.”
The policy remains the same. Naturally the incumbent president needs to deal with not only with individual cases, like it was with Mashtots Park, but guaranteed that competent bodies will act in a proper manner. And it turns out these bodies act irrelevantly, while the president is running a PR campaign at his own will. This is a proof that the country is in a paralyzed state due to the inactions by state bodies. The president should ensure the proper work of the state bodies for these problems not to arise. And in this regard, we don’t record any success.
February 04, 2013 at 12:18