1 / 9

On November 5, at the joint sitting of the Standing Committees of the National Assembly on Foreign Relations and on Financial-Credit and Budgetary Affairs moderated by Ruben Rubinyan and Arkady Khachatryan the incomes and expenditures designed in the RA draft law on the RA State Budget for 2021 on the payments of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and joining the international organizations.

The RA Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan touched upon the concrete programmes and the targeted use of the designed allocations. The main directions and priorities for 2020-2021 are global and regional security, the reforms of Armenia, the economic and infra-structural development support and presentation of history and character of Armenia abroad. To the Minister's conviction, during these two years, the process of reforms has continued and continues, and its goal is the strengthening of professional capabilities, the establishment of the foreign institution its activities based on our national resource, comparing with the institutional accumulated experience, the enforcement of new specialists’ capabilities and cooperation with international counterparts. Zohrab Mnatsakanyan has assured that this process is continuous and now we are in a phase, when the results of the reforms give an opportunity more regulating the work of the programmed reforms. The Foreign Ministry has a goal to expand our representations in different parts of the world. In this respect, the Minister noted some rectifications had been made on that agenda, taking into consideration the realities in 2020. According to the rapporteur, an attempt has been made to keep the goals for 2021 and additional allocation of the budget is designed by the direction of the Government and the Prime Minister.

To the Minister's assessment, reforms have been made, which based on the international and national experience give an opportunity rearranging the system of our compensations in the diplomatic representations to be able to more balance and invest precise system. It has been noted that this is implemented in the context of equal development of capabilities, and the balancing of representations is one of the important goals.

The next important goal is to strengthen the capabilities of diplomatic representations in terms of increasing the human resources.

The Minister has made clear that for a long time situations had been, when our representations have been compiled with minimum staff members, which has a direct influence on the quality of the work.

The next important direction is the strengthening of the specialists' training system based on the national platform.

The Minister reminded that the year 2020 was a very tense year: from the beginning of the very year the influence of the pandemic was great, connected with this the Foreign Ministry had done appropriate large-scale work. He has underlined that now the activities in the foreign sphere are completely created by the war situation and has added that in the current conditions the works are coordinated in the RA Government and between the counterparts. The Minister also expressed his gratitude to the NA deputies for the cooperation.

Responding to the MPs' concern about the work done in the foreign diplomacy sphere and the situation created on availability of the international counterparts in this war situation is conditioned by that, Zohrab Mnatsakanyan noted: “We don't have lack of friends in the world. We cooperate as a state on different platforms and in different directions. We are very distinct in terms of logic of formation of foreign policy priorities. That logic is built on the prior goal of persecuting our national interests, and the architecture of our national security is conscientiously built. Today, we have a very serious challenge before us, which also expresses some geopolitical realities in regional aspect, realities, which are considered as a challenge not only for Armenia. It relates to the aggressive policy that Turkey pursues.”

The Minister thoroughly also answered to the MPs' other questions.