Speech of Gagik Yeganyan, Head of the State
Department for Migration and
Refugees of the Republic of Armenia
54th Meeting of Bureau of European Committee
on Migration
3-4 July, 2003, Strasburg
Dear Chairman,
I would like to
draw Your attention to an important event, which has been recently organized
in Yerevan by CoE Secretariat.
The matter concerns "Migration and Integration" the workshop organized in May 29-30. The basic aim of the workshop was to familiarize the participants with the European approaches and standards applied in the mentioned field. The subjects of the workshop are strictly urgent for Armenia, since currently Armenia is implementing a large-scaled program directed to the local integration of refugees, even at the world level. The matter concerns the integration of the mass of the refugees, constituting about 10 % of the Republic's population.
The other issue discussed in details at the workshop, concerned the Russian new legislation on migration. To this aim two highly-qualified experts were invited from Moscow. Within the last years the vector of the migration flows from Armenia was basically directed towards the Russian Federation, and this trend continues up to now. The 75-80% of the emmigrants from Armenia chooses the Russian Federation as the destination country and it is not accidental that our population and the representatives of the state bodies have great interest in the new legislation of the Russian Federation.
The staff members of the RA President, National Assembly, Government, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Social Security, the Department for Migration and Refugees, as well as the representatives of local and international non-governmental organizations and independent researches participated in the workshop. The works of the workshop were broadly covered by almost all TV companies and large newspapers.
The success of the workshop is the result of the efforts applied by Mr. Simon Tonelli, member of the Secretariat of the CoE, and I want to express my gratitude to him for this.
Thank You.