By Karine Kalantarian
The Justice Ministry presented on Friday a comprehensive online database of the Armenian laws, decisions taken by all government bodies and Constitutional Court rulings which citizens will be able to access free of charge.The ministry’s Armenian Legal Information System (ARLIS) is part of an effort to increase government transparency in Armenia. The World Bank has helped to launch the Armenian-language website, www.arlis.am, donating $330,000 for that purpose.
Justice Minister David Harutiunian said it will be filled with relevant official documents within the next three months. “We are talking not only about laws,” he said. “We are also talking about all decisions taken by the government, ministries and local government bodies as well as decisions taken by the Constitutional Court. We will cover the entire field.”
Harutiunian added that the full texts of verdicts handed down by Armenia’s Court of Appeals will also be available online in the near future.
The laws are already posted on the Armenian parliament’s website that was redesigned two years ago with the financial assistance of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Central government directives can be accessed at another, privately owned website, but the service is not free of charge. They are also published in the government’s “Official Gazette.” The publication has a limited circulation though.
ARLIS, which has a search engine, will therefore be more accessible and contain a lot more data.
(Photolur photo: Harutiunian, left, and the World Bank representative in Yerevan, Roger Robinson, pictured during the presentation.)