President Serzh Sargsyan convenes National Security Council session

The National Security Council of the Republic of Armenia was assembled for a session today, chaired by the President of the Republic of Armenia and the Chairman of the National Security Council Serzh Sargsyan.

In his opening address to the participants of the session, the President said:
«For about a quarter century our country has lived through a hard path of the making of democratic institutions. The making of our statehood has been anchored on the rule of law, freedom of speech, political pluralism and other fundamental principles, none of which has ever been questioned. Unfortunately, of course, there had been time periods when these principles were more of a declarative nature and did not correspond to the realities. Meanwhile, we have always been conscious there are values beyond private, group, partisan or other interests. The most important among those is securing the domestic tranquility and solidarity in our country, which becomes even further valuable in the face of ongoing regional and geopolitical developments.

The preservation of this value itself also suggests a continuous political race and the exercise of other means for the expression and protection of various interests as established in democratic societies.

However, recently it has become even more emboldened that certain people have got intentions and attempt to take their agenda items out of the political frameworks and seek to find other solutions. Up until today the evaluations given to specific actions and the analyses of those issues have remained in the political domain.

I believe today is the high time to discuss such actions and other related phenomena with a view to the national security. It is our tasks to evaluate to what extent those existing challenges endanger the vitally important interests of the citizen, society and the state, and to formulate a common approach what shall be the means to neutralize those challenges.
The aforementioned shall in no ways entail the state had no definite stance regarding that set of issues so crucial for the normal functioning of the society, or is now formulating new approaches.

Specifically speaking, the state has never endorsed any ambiguous propaganda of violence; for good or bad – even though it is not an issue at the moment – has been doing its best to oversee the legitimacy of the funds generated, to some extent has reacted to the use of dubious financial resources for political ends, and has periodically responded to the disproportionate employment of technical and organizational assets for the sake of the protection of private interests.

Of course, all this is integral part of daily duties of relevant public authorities. However when all such negative phenomena are being pooled together to serve certain interests against the national security, the attitude towards it shall be different in principle. What shall it look like, we are here to discuss today».

Through discussions at the National Security Council session a common approach was formulated on how to evaluate those phenomena challenging the national security, and the issue of adequate measures based on the level of their gravity was considered. The members of the Council were unanimous that means to neutralize any challenge emerging for the national security of the Republic of Armenia shall be in accordance with the standards of justice and rule of law.