The Freedom House has classified Armenia in the list of partly free countries during a recent report. It is the tenth year that Armenia is classified a partly free country in the report, where the human rights and freedoms are not respected in duly manner, the rule of law is weak, and even though if there is some plurality of opinions, only one political power is dominating in politics. “It is the second year that Armenia continues to fail improvements in terms of democracy and human freedoms; the impression is that the political situation in Armenia is becoming a swamp,” said expert of the Freedom House Catherine Machalek to radio Liberty. According to her in 2011 there have been almost not improvements in either positive or negative directions, and the only change was the raised ban on demonstrations in the Freedom Square, commitment to release the prisoners resulted from March 1 and investigate the case, as well as enter into dialogue with the opposition. She said that the dialogue between the authorities and opposition was positive itself but they were pretty suspicious about the results. Concerning their reservations about the dialogue the expert said that any time when the dialogue was moving in a direction that was not desirable for the authorities, they were trying to give up on the dialogue. “I wouldn’t say that the government was fully open and really wanted to make changes,” said the representative of the Freedom House and pointed out at the recent reforms to the Electoral code. “In that process the demands of the opposition were not taken into account, which will not contribute to organizing better elections,” said the expert and added that many international experts believe that the Armenian government made those changes not for the purpose of making changes in the system but for the purpose of easing the tension in the society as it was afraid of the processes happening in Middle East. “I wouldn’t say that those reforms were a result of the local processes; those are more a result of the processes that are happening in another region, in the Arab world. They were afraid that the same thing could happen in Armenia too. I believe those were done for the purpose to save the administration rather than foster development,” said the representative of the Freedom House.
