“On January 23-25, RA Minister of Foreign Affairs Ararat Mirzoyan will be in Brussels on a working visit. Ararat Mirzoyan will deliver a speech at the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, where he will address the issues of stability and security in the South Caucasus, the humanitarian crisis created in Nagorno-Karabakh due to the blocking of the Lachin Corridor, the Armenia-Azerbaijan settlement process, and the RA-EU interaction. The Minister of Foreign Affairs will also answer the questions of the members of the European Parliament”. The quote is from the RA MFA spokesperson’s Facebook post about two weeks ago, which informed about Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan’s to Brussels, planned meetings, and discussion agendas.
At first glance, there is nothing strange, but further developments at least raise questions. For example, later, it became clear that Ararat Mirzoyan’s meeting in the Council of Europe (CE) Foreign Affairs Committee, the planned question-and-answer session, would be in a closed format. Information about the format of the meeting was posted on the website of the CE Committee on Foreign Affairs.
After the meeting, neither the written version of Ararat Mirzoyan’s speech nor a part of it was posted on the MFA website. There was no official, scanty or fragmentary information about the question-and-answer session of the RA Foreign Minister and the European MPs. The Swedish Foreign Minister also had a speech and a question-and-answer session with the committee members at the same session, which was open. Aravot. am tried to find out from the RA Ministry of Foreign Affairs why the RA Foreign Minister’s speech and question-and-answer session were not public.
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Did the Armenian side insist that the meeting and the question-and-answer session be held in a closed format? For what reason was such a claim made if the European side insisted on the closed format of the meeting, and why did the Armenian side agree to that? To Aravot. am’s written questions, we received the following answer from the Head of the Information and Public Diplomacy Department of the RA Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “In response to your request, we inform you that the procedure of the meeting held in the CE Foreign Relations Committee was decided by mutual agreement of the parties.”
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs preferred to diplomatically bypass our questions about the reasons for choosing the format. By the way, this answer does not dispel; it condenses the doubts about the choice of such a meeting format, primarily since, according to the “news hanging in the air,” the conversation between Ararat Mirzoyan and the European MPs was related to the actions of the Russian Federation- declared a strategic partner of Armenia, during this period, especially it’s behavior shown on the occasion of the closure of the Berdzor corridor. What Ararat Mirzoyan told the European MPs and what reactions he received; unfortunately, the Armenian public will never know, as the Foreign Ministry explained, “by mutual agreement of the parties.”
Nelly GRIGORYAN
