1 / 4

The Chief of Staff, the Secretary General of the RA National Assembly Arnak Avetisyan and the Secretary General of the Seimas of the Republic of Armenia Modestas Gelbūda discussed in the distant format the features of the establishment and activity of the Seimas Visitors’ Centre.

The sides expressed hope that after the mitigation of the pandemic the cooperation would also continue through mutual visits of the Staffs of the two countries’ parliaments.

The Chief of Staff, the Secretary General of the RA National Assembly Arnak Avetisyan particularly noted in his speech:

“Mr Secretary General, attendants of this meeting, it is a pleasure to welcome you all during this first of its kind meeting between the high level officials of the Staffs of National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia and Seimas of the Lithuanian Republic.

I would like to thank our partner International Republican Institute for organizing and supporting this meeting, we highly appreciate our partnership.

Firstly, I would like to congratulate the Secretary General on the appointment to the office and would like to wish him the best of luck.

Our online meeting is preceded by the official visit of the Speaker of the National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan to Vilnius, during which he met the Speaker of the Seimas Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen, the President of Lithuania Gitanas Nausėda and the Prime Minister of Lithuania Ingrida Šimonytė as well as other high-profile officials.

During the meeting both sides emphasized that this year marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between our two countries and it is quite remarkable that the Staffs of the Parliaments of our countries will contribute to these relations․

We are interested in building strong bilateral partnership with Seimas in order to share our experience. We are heading to snap parliamentary elections this upcoming month and I am sure the next Parliament whether it would be the same majority or other will be interested in strengthening our partnership and bringing it to the new level.

Going into the business I would like to emphasize that openness and public outreach were our priorities during current convocation. Much has been done during this short period of time with a help of our international partners throughout the difficulties we faced during the pandemic and the war at the end of the past year. I would like to note that since 2018, the newly elected National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia among other objectives, confers importance to the education of citizens in the process of strengthening participatory democracy. We prioritize the establishment of a Center for Parliamentary Democracy, which will consist of 3 components:

1. Visitor Center designed to facilitate the access of citizens to the NA and their meetings with MP’s; 2. Information and Outreach Center designed to increase the interest and awareness of the parliamentary culture amongst a wide range of visitors;

3. Parliamentary Education Unit designed to promote civic education amongst the youth.

This is the reason we have chosen communications with external stakeholders as a topic of our today’s discussion. Much work should be done to achieve the goal of being open, transparent and accessible to our citizens including developing new digital channels, creating new infrastructure, making organizational and structural changes inside the institution, giving MPs new tools of communication and so on.

As previously mentioned one of our projects is to build a new Visitors center next year and we are very much interested to obtain the experience of the Seimas in this area.

So I would like to wish us all a very interesting discussion and hoping that in the near future we will have the opportunity to continue our fruitful partnership during off-line mutual visits of our Staffs to our countries.”