Today, on the Human Rights Day, it is a good opportunity to speak of not only the situation in that area in Armenia, but also human rights organizations. It seems to me that the main problem of our human rights advocates is that they are extremely politicized – they are mostly “oppositionists”, although there are also “pro-government supporters” – but using those epithets while talking about human rights advocates (by the way, as well as mass media) is nonsense; their beneficiary should be Human and not a certain party.
Human rights advocates, as a rule, make statements on issues arousing public resonance, since it is easier to get dividends and win glory of a brave warrior fighting for human rights in that way. They usually don’t care much for ordinary people living in a distant village whose, let’s say, headman treats them as slaves.
The other problem of the human rights advocates is foreign grants. Sometimes those are given for unknown reasons (roughly to organize a dialogue between the residents of the first and second floor of a certain apartment building) and one starts to generally doubt the efficiency of such human rights advocates’ activities. One is under the impression that donor organizations are interested not in the work they will do, but how convincing the application for grant and its report will be written. Under the conditions when people suffer from arbitrariness of officials at different levels, organizing seminar-discussions on empty things seems to solve only the social problems of the organizers.
Another issue related to this is incorrect distribution of the areas of human rights protection. I don’t think that number one problem in Armenia is the protection of sexual and religious minorities. We are if not on the same level, then drop behind very little from developed countries in these issues. E.g. the protection of women’s rights is a more important issue – the family violence seems to become one of our main evils. Human rights in Armenia and any other country are violated at every turn. The struggle against those violations will be efficient insofar as it avoids political rhetoric. International human rights organizations are a good example of that.
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ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
