Health Minister Anahit Avanesian imposed the requirement on October 1 in an effort to speed up the slow pace of vaccinations in Armenia.
Her initial directive obligated virtually all public and private sector employees to get inoculated against COVID-19 or tested twice a month at their own expense. Such mandatory testing now has to be done once a week.
The requirement has been denounced by Armenians reluctant to get vaccinated as well as some opposition groups. A group of opposition parliamentarians challenged its legality in the Constitutional Court.
In a ruling publicized late on Thursday, the court party said the measure is partly unconstitutional. Citizens cannot be forced to pay for their tests, it said.
Aram Vartevanian, a lawmaker from the opposition Hayastan alliance who led the appeal, welcomed the ruling. He said it means that the government must exempt ordinary workers from what he regards as exorbitant testing fees.
The Armenian Ministry of Health offered a different interpretation of the court’s decision, however.
“The Constitutional Court’s decision did not create any obligation for the state or the employer to pay for an employee’s PCR tests,” Anna Mkrtumian, the head of the ministry’s legal department, told reporters on Friday. Nor did the court scrap the testing requirement for anti-vaxxers, she said.
In a separate statement on the ruling, the Ministry of Health likewise insisted that unvaccinated “workers will have to undergo tests in any case.”
The government’s vaccination campaign accelerated significantly after the testing requirement took effect on October 1. Officials say this is one of the reasons why coronavirus infections in Armenia have fallen dramatically in recent weeks after reaching record levels this fall.
Even so, the country’s vaccination rate remains low by international standards. Ministry of Health data shows that only some 643,000 people in the country of about 3 million were fully vaccinated as of December 19. More than 260,000 others received one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.
Health Minister Avanesian said on Thursday that Armenian health authorities have not yet detected any cases of the new Omicron variant of the virus.