Author: Tigran Amiryan

This article discusses the issue of cultural rights in modern Armenia. The period studied is mainly focused on the span between 2018 and 2022. The author focuses on such areas as gender policies and access to culture for women and LGBTQ+ people, the issue of public spaces in the urban environment, the issue of cultural heritage in the context of military conflicts and territorial changes, and the issue of neo/post-coloniality faced by the Armenian cultural space.

From fundamental rights to the cultural domain

 

Today, we have been increasingly facing numerous cases of cultural rights infringements in a wide range of countries globally¹. Besides the growing number of bans and repressions against artistic expression, the pandemic², extremism and increasing military conflicts are causing a very challenging situation for artists and cultural workers, with advocacy and strengthening of the research and public debate around cultural rights seeming quite imperative. In the last few years alone, political developments in our region have led to regular violations of cultural rights in countries such as Armenia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, etc. In recent years, hundreds of Belarusian artists were exposed to a political crackdown in their own country³, some cultural actors were forced to leave Minsk and other cities, and artists, writers and researchers remain in prison on trumped up charges. Both the consequences of the 44-day war in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020 and Russia’s ongoing months-long full-scale war against Ukraine have left millions without the right or access to education, numerous cultural monuments have been destroyed by Russian military forces in Ukraine⁴, and the Armenian cultural heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh is still being destroyed even today⁵.

Before exploring the issues of the transformation of cultural rights that are relevant for modern Armenia, it seems we need to briefly review the historic background of the shaping of the new concept bordering the two spheres of culture and human rights. At this point, it should be emphasized that, in the context of cultural rights, we define culture as both the production of cultural products and practices and the process of consuming them, and we consider that both authors of cultural practices (artists, curators, art managers, etc.) and scholars, as well as stakeholders of educational processes in a country, are cultural rights holders. Yet, the principal function of cultural rights is to protect “the right to culture” of ordinary citizens. That said, cultural rights are a multidimensional and heterogeneous phenomenon, which applies not only to the professional community, but also to those who are or are not, due to various reasons, the beneficiaries of this environment.

Adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is considered one of the origins of the cultural rights concept, where articles 26 and 27 state the right of everyone to free access to education and participation in cultural life. Two decades later, in 1966, the fundamental declaration on human rights was extended with the adoption of a new instrument, the International

Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights⁶, which for the first time set out the basic aspects of cultural rights, which, on the one hand, state the right of everyone to participate in cultural life and the obligation of each State Party to the Covenant to guarantee freedom of creativity and research, on the other.

Despite the long track record of the notion’s evolution, as this term enriched and consolidated, the cultural rights concept as a working method for human rights and cultural organizations is relatively new not only in the South Caucasus or post- socialist countries, but also in many countries with a high level of democracy and respect for human rights. Cultural rights are primarily aimed at the democratization of the cultural sphere of a country, respect for cultural workers’ rights, and the monitoring of the equal access to cultural life for all citizens. The cultural rights debate entered its active phase among human rights defenders and various human rights organizations in 2009, when the UN Human Rights Council for the first time established the position of the Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights⁷. The academic community had begun to reflect on this concept in the 1990s, trying to shape the methodological framework⁸ of cultural rights, classify them⁹ or question the possible autonomy of this phenomenon¹⁰. One of the precursors of shaping the cultural rights concept, as we can interpret the term today, was the 2001 UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity and another document based on this declaration, the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, adopted in 2005.

In 2013, the Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights Farida Shaheed delivered a report offering a more comprehensive and thorough perspective than earlier, defining cultural rights and the limits of this notion. In her report, Shahid highlighted the ubiquitous mechanism of repressions and bans preventing authors from free creation and expression of their creative ideas. A few years following this report, our region also felt the sweeping advance of repressive mechanisms depriving artists of the right to free expression. In this respect, Armenia found itself among such countries as Iran, Turkey and Azerbaijan where crackdowns against artists’ freedoms reached the highest limits. On the other hand, Armenia, as we will show later, is still subject to the strong economic and media influence of Russia, where the repression of freedom of speech and overall freedom has reached its limits over the past decade.

Cultural rights are a human rights element. There are four cultural rights pillars: the right to education, the right to participate in cultural life, the right to scientific research, and copyright. Regrettably, people in many countries perceive cultural rights only as the last copyright pillar, often ignoring other equally important types of cultural rights of every citizen. This is why the scope of research and monitoring of cultural rights often includes such components as gender, ethnicity, etc. These indicators enable us to observe the situation with effectively functioning rights and freedoms in the cultural sphere of a country in more detail. Respecting copyright does not mean there is no discrimination in terms of access to culture and education for migrants, women, or LGBTQ+ people, etc.

In 2022, the cultural rights notion started to spread in the Eastern Partnership countries thanks to the New Democracy Fund and the Danish Cultural Institute. The authors Ole Reitov and Helle Porsdam compiled for the first time a so-called Cultural Rights Manual based both on global principles and building on the Eastern Partnership countries’ experience. The Danish authors present the cultural rights through the prism of existing issues of violating human rights of artists and cultural workers in such countries as Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, etc. The Cultural Rights Manual, originally prepared in English, was translated into Armenian, Georgian, and other languages in 2021–2022.

Speaking of cultural rights in Armenia, it should be mentioned that, of the four types of cultural rights, copyright is the most legally regulated type. Despite frequent copyright violations and litigation of copyright holders, the law passed in 2006 sets out authors’ rights in quite a thorough manner and protects the intellectual property of artists, writers, and researchers¹¹. Therefore, in this article, we would like not to focus on the copyright issue, but rather concentrate on the cultural rights that are most often infringed in Armenia and are poorly protected by the state. These cultural domains include the rights of the LGBT+ community and women’s rights in the cultural sphere and in the context of access to culture, the issue of public space and urban transformations, with frequent violations of citizens’ rights to possess and freely use urban space, the issue of cultural heritage, which has been in constant crisis due to the military conflicts with Azerbaijan and, finally, one of the pressing issues of cultural rights violations in Armenia, the colonial attitude of Russia and Russian-speaking migrants in Armenia.

Gender and cultural rights in Armenia

 

In recent years, various NGOs have been actively working in Armenia trying to influence the gender equality situation and to protect the rights and freedoms of LGBT+ people. In their routine work, these organizations are trying to provide social, psychological, and other assistance to women faced with discrimination and domestic violence, and to vulnerable groups having suffered from violence or psychological discrimination, such as LGBTQ+ people. Organizations such as Pink Armenia, the Women’s Resource Center¹², the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Women, etc. have been involved in this work in various settings, which is difficult for an almost permanently militarized and rather patriarchal Armenia. The annual reports of the Women’s Resource Center show that, despite the positive dynamics in public discourse (looking at the dynamics from 1991 to 2021), the social role of women remains within the framework of patriarchal notions, and LGBTQ+ people are still subject to various kinds of discrimination both in public life and in the cultural sphere¹³. While roughly outlining the internal (family and Armenian society) and the external (military aggression of Azerbaijan) discriminatory processes against women, it should be noted that the Second Karabakh War, or the war in Karabakh in 2020, caused a new wave of external aggression against Armenian women, and the consequences of the military conflict are still violating women’s rights even today¹⁴. This situation of post-war depression and social radicalization has pushed back both the issues of cultural life and the democratization of the cultural sphere, as well as the debate on any minorities and vulnerable groups. That said, in its annual reports on the situation of LGBTQ+ people in Armenia, Pink Armenia has prefaced the 2021 report with the following passage: “2021 was marked by post- war sentiments; the priorities within the country underwent a turning point and human rights priorities were pushed to the background. In this period, hate speech, speech containing mutual enmity, and intolerance have become more widespread on the Internet. On the one hand, it is due to the uncertain and tense political situation, when in an environment of huge media flow and misinformation the society begins to react emotionally to various vulnerable issues. On the other hand, it is conditioned by political manipulations used by different groups and political forces to create certain predispositions in society. In this context, by becoming a cause for political speculations the LGBT community has once again become a target and means of manipulation. Consequently, all this has had a negative impact on public sentiment, making LGBT people even more vulnerable”¹⁵.

When it comes to legislative changes, two documents should be noted that have influenced the “gender policy” and/or provoked a new gender debate in post-Soviet Armenia. The first document is the Law on Equal Rights and Equal Opportunities of Men and Women adopted in 2013; the second is the Istanbul Convention, which has never been ratified. Both the adopted law and the attempts to ratify the Convention have always been accompanied by great scandals and dissent of the Armenian Apostolic Church, right-wing activists and the local media owned by oligarchs and political forces having lost their power after the Velvet Revolution of 2018. After the liberal Civil Contract party came to power, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan delivered the first-ever speech from a high rostrum in independent Armenia, in which he specifically emphasized the “importance of women’s role” in the activities of the new government. However, despite the gender democratization promises, over the past four years, men have still overwhelmingly prevailed in both the government sector and various administrative government sectors. The Criminal Code does not cover in any way cases of discrimination or harming the life of people on the grounds of their gender or sexual identity¹⁶.

The analysis¹⁷ we conducted in 2021 shows that, despite the great social and awareness-raising efforts of the nongovernmental sector, the cultural sphere is never studied from the gender aspect perspective. The organizations working with gender equality issues have little or no involvement with the cultural sector. UNESCO’s annual reports from Armenia never cover the issue of the gender policy in culture, but in real cultural life these changes are obvious, and their dynamics deserve separate attention.

Coming back to the issues of cultural rights, it needs to be emphasized that the gender issue applies precisely to the possibility of participating in cultural life. In this regard, despite the lack of specific draft laws, the country’s Constitution and existing legislative regulations do not prohibit or restrict participation in cultural life of either women or LGBTQ+ people. Most probably, this concerns sociocultural taboos, restrictions and prohibitions supported by the media and public debate.

The CSN Lab’s report on the gender situation in the cultural sphere in Armenia contains several recommendations, among which the need to develop an internal gender policy for various institutions is prioritized. Indeed, none of the surveyed major cultural institutions had any regulatory document or methodologies to monitor the gender situation. The absence of such a working methodology affects both large government cultural institutions and independent cultural set-ups.

It should be noted that the Velvet Revolution of 2018 played a big role in changing the “cultural gender policy,” with activists and women artists having led the protest movements for days¹⁸. Such involvement of women in the political transformations in the country inspired the main theme of the Armenian pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale curated by Susanna Gyulamiryan. For the first time in the history of a major international contemporary art biennale, the pavilion was curated by a female curator from Armenia¹⁹, and the main part of the pavilion themed “Revolutionary Sensorium” was made up of video interviews with female researchers, artists, and queer activists talking about their involvement in the revolutionary process²⁰. In our gender analysis of the cultural sphere in Armenia we also distinguish a few independent institutions and art collectives regularly supporting the debate on gender equality and LGBT+ people, with the lately emerged independent Fem Library platform playing an important role among such cases in our desk analysis, together with the queer activist and female artist collective Queering Yerevan Collective and others. All these initiatives and independent institutions are having a tangible impact on the cultural space of the country by criticizing any manifestations of patriarchal supremacy, discrimination against women and queer people. These organizations and individual actors are the important element of the process to establish a culture equally accessible for all people, regardless of gender or sexuality.

The right to public space

 

The largest activist movements in post-Soviet Armenia, along with gender activism and eco-activism, have focused on preserving public areas in the city and old neighbourhoods. Over the past two decades, urban activists, together with human rights activists, have regularly faced aggressive takeovers of the urban environment by businesses, with the tacit consent of the city authorities. The most high-profile cases to protect urban spaces and parts of the old city included the protests against the demolition of the summer theatre of Moscow Cinema (2010)²¹, against the construction of Northern Avenue (2002–2006), the case to protect Mashtots Park (2012), the protests against the demolition of the Afrikyan²² mansion and the old Firdus neighbourhood (2019)²³, the protests against the demolition of the Physics Institute territory (Fizgorodok) in 2022, etc. Each of these movements has its own development record, with a different domestic and foreign political context, but almost all of the city’s conservation protests are a civil society response to the use of the law on recognizing and further alienating areas of the utmost public value. The law on utmost public value was passed in 1995, and despite constant protests and public dissent, it was revised several times (in 2002 and 2006), but was never abolished, neither before the Velvet Revolution, nor after 2018. Almost new construction developments following the recognition of an urban site an area of the utmost value involved a uniform procedure of complete or partial demolition of former buildings, including sites having effective or potential status of cultural monuments. Activists and researchers have repeatedly stated that the destruction of the urban environment causes the extinction of its identity and social and cultural memory. If we try to categorize which urban sites suffered through the several-decades-long process of ruining the city’s history, we can distinguish the following city elements: residential or private buildings having the status of a cultural monument, public buildings with the same status, public areas (squares, parks, and public gardens), natural zones (rivers, parks), parts of the old city. The first high-profile case of violating citizens’ cultural rights was the attempt to take over Mashtots Park in the city centre, when public dissent grew into a large protest movement consolidated by the slogan “We are the owners of our city” and the hashtags #SaveMashtotsPark and #OccupyMashtots. The Mashtots Park protection movement can be considered one of the few protest movements bringing the triumph of civil society and the preservation of the park as a free public area. At that point, an entirely new culture of struggle to preserve urban space and a new awareness of the importance of urban public areas was shaped for Armenian society. The destruction of a large neighbourhood further replaced by the Northern Avenue in 2006 did not face such a backlash and the strong resistance of civil society against the city authorities and businesses: back then, not only was the organization effort weak with a lack of understanding of the ways to address the issue and to combat it, but, most importantly, there was no awareness of the protest and struggle methods to save various urban spaces. While the language of protest had not yet formed during the construction of the Northern Avenue, when dozens of families were forcibly evicted from their homes, in 2019 activists defending the Firdus²⁴ neighbourhood in the heart of Yerevan were more aware and armed with the methodology and rhetoric to criticize the authorities. The Firdus matter showed that the Ministry of Culture and the city authorities most often use the reasoning of whether or not a particular architectural object is included in the list of cultural monuments, but for civil society actors it was important to preserve not just individual buildings or, as developers suggested, their facades, but the cultural and historical environment²⁵, which had given birth to the intangible culture (the memory of the local community, daily practices of the neighbourhood and its residents, etc.).

The colonial past and the cultural rights of the present time

 

The Language Law (ՀՀ-52), signed by the Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan in 1993, states in its Article 4 that all officials, initiatives, and organizations in the territory of Armenia must use the standard Armenian language, and all public events shall be held in Armenian, with simultaneous interpretation provided if necessary. However, this law did not prevent the organizers of the Yerevan Book Fair in September 2022 from hosting some events in Russian without simultaneous or consecutive interpretation. And some events of the festival were hosted not with Russian into Armenian translation for the local audience, but vice versa, from Armenian into Russian to make it easier to understand for the festival guests.

The large wave of migration from Russia due to the war against Ukraine forced many thousands of Russian people to relocate to Armenia temporarily or permanently and during the seven months migrants have held numerous pop concerts, launched public entertainment venues (coffee shops, nightclubs, and restaurants), held numerous public educational and outreach events, and have rarely cared about the need to provide translation into the Armenian language. In some instances, completely absurd situations have occurred, with researchers having discussions about colonialism or the imperial views of official Russia in Russian. Given that three decades have passed since the adoption of the mentioned language law, a generation of young people under 35 who have no or poor command of Russian has formed in Armenia. The hosting of a major book festival where a significant part²⁶ (15 out of 58 events) of the pavilions offer events in a foreign language for Armenians without translation is one of the numerous examples of direct discrimination of Armenian citizens’ cultural rights and exclusion of the youth generation from the current educational and cultural process. The developments of 2022 showed that the colonial attitude towards Armenia of Russian intellectuals and cultural figures persists regardless of their political affiliation, and even beyond the issue of coloniality and the need to decolonize the former Soviet republics they are discussing. The risks of a new colonization of the cultural space by the Russian migrants were already apparent in the first months of Russia’s war against Ukraine²⁷. At that moment, banners, graffiti, announcements, etc. in Russian began to appear in Yerevan in volumes which quickly overwhelmed any Armenian signage in the city even though, coming back to the current language law, one of the clauses states that “banners, forms, logos, correspondence, seals, international postal envelopes, all kinds of advertising must be issued in Armenian, with translation into other languages if necessary”. Almost all the provisions of this law are regularly breached, infringing Armenian citizens’ rights, primarily their cultural rights.

It should be noted that this problem is not new for independent Armenia²⁸: Russian representatives (such as the Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States, Compatriots Living Abroad, and International Humanitarian Cooperation – Rossotrudnichestvo and the Russkiy Mir Foundation chapter in Armenia) regularly resume concerns over allegedly anti-Russian cultural policies in Armenia. For years, these organizations have been implementing educational or cultural projects to support and spread the Russian language in Armenia, while also actively pushing the Russian political rhetoric based on phobias and falsifications about the Global West, etc. The backlash from pro-Russian media and pundits also surged in Armenia in 2020 when it was proposed to remove the Russian TV channels from the free broadcasting package for Armenian viewers. The Russian channels remain popular not only among ordinary viewers (according to different estimates, up to 40% of viewers receive information from these media), but also among many media outlets in Armenia, which often simply rebroadcast information from the Russian media without checking its accuracy, etc.²⁹

The issue of the status of the Russian language or its insufficient presence in the educational and cultural life of Armenians, according to those representing the Russian authorities, sparks hot discussions almost every year, but the situation has changed dramatically in 2020–2022. On the one hand, after the Second Karabakh War, the number of Russian troops in Nagorno-Karabakh and in Armenia itself increased with the new peacekeeping capacity, and on the other hand, the war in Ukraine caused a large flow of Russian people migrating to Armenia. In a recent speech, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov revisited the issue of the Russian language in Armenia and announced that more Russian-language schools would be opened³⁰.

It should be pointed out that access to culture for each citizen is fundamental for cultural rights. As for the Russian language, which is spreading extensively in Armenia’s public domain, it utterly excludes a part of the population from cultural life and creates a challenge for these people. Vulnerable and frustrated after the 44-day war in Karabakh, Armenian society is feeling this pressure even further, while the authorities are simply ignoring the problem, being incapable or unwilling to use any ways to balance the language policy in the cultural sphere.

The right to memory

 

2020 turned out to be a tragic year for hundreds of thousands of Armenians, especially for those Armenians who were forced to leave Nagorno-Karabakh due to Azerbaijan’s military aggression. The 44-day war took the lives of over 4,000 soldiers and civilians. After most of the Nagorno-Karabakh territory came under Azerbaijani control in 2020 and settlements in the south of Armenia were occupied by the Azerbaijani army in 2022, cases of destruction of Armenian cultural monuments have been repeatedly reported31. Along with other fundamental human rights, cultural rights are regularly violated: due to the forced displacement, thousands of Armenian schoolchildren and students do not have access to education, and the operation of local cultural organizations has been interrupted. Throughout 2021 we conducted research to identify the forms of memory after the forced migration of the Armenian population from the city of Shusha/Shushi, the cultural hub of Nagorno-Karabakh32. In-depth sociological interviews and the assembly of mental maps showed that, along with their own home, the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral was and remains the main topos of Karabakh refugees’ recollections, together with other Armenian churches, as well as the Shusha gymnasium, museums, etc., which were an important part of the day-to-day and cultural life of thousands Karabakh Armenians. Thousands of Karabakh Armenians were challenged to take refuge and have their cultural rights regularly violated, which continued even after their resettlement to Armenian cities: Azerbaijani social networks regularly posted videos showing the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage monuments, and the houses, schools, and kindergartens of Karabakh Armenians. Displaced persons were left without the physical space of their day-to-day living and without the right to keep their memories of this space.

The resolution adopted by the European Parliament in March 2022 was supported by many international organizations33, but the destruction of the cultural environment and settlements did not cease. On 13 and 14 September, the Azerbaijani army extended its offence beyond the disputed territory of Karabakh and attacked the territory of Armenia itself, killing more than 200 soldiers in two days, taking prisoners of war and occupying new territories in the southern part of Armenia. This act of military aggression forced thousands to leave their living places interrupting education, employment, etc. The resort town of Jermuk, a place where many Soviet modernist monuments are located and one of the most important hubs on the cultural map of Armenian architecture, urbanism, etc., was damaged as a result of massive shelling.

In addition to direct human rights violations, including cultural rights of the Armenian citizens and the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh, the war consequences have led to an atmosphere of total distrust and disillusionment with democratic values. After the 2020 war, the so-called War Trophy Park was opened in Baku, displaying scenes of suffering, killing and humiliation of Armenian soldiers and prisoners of war, with the triumphant wax figure of President Aliyev in the background34. This visualization of the victory of President Aliyev’s dictatorial regime over Armenia’s young democracy caused new social narratives, with the dehumanized image of Azerbaijan’s victory directly indicating the loss of the liberal Armenian government and its poorly equipped army. In this situation of dehumanization, militaristic propaganda and anti-democratic social attitudes, cultural and human rights in general are at risk not only in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Armenian-populated Karabakh, but also in the entire region.

In lieu of a conclusion

 

Each of the explored cases of cultural rights violations in Armenia is a serious problem on the path to developing democracy and a free society both in the country and in the entire region. Each of these cases has been briefly presented as an Armenia-specific example of cultural rights violations after the 2018 Velvet Revolution, but it is obvious that each of these areas (gender policy of culture, free urban space, military aggression, and cultural rights) needs both legal regulation and more in-depth public discussions. There is no doubt that all these cases of cultural rights being breached must become the subject of an individual and more thorough study.

Footnotes

[1] Cultural rights violations can be diverse depending on the political context and the overall level of human rights sentiment. For instance, the assault against the French media outlet Charlie Hebdo in 2015 is a vivid example of cultural rights violations. But in our region, cases of artists’ rights infringements and persecution against them are not uncommon either. For instance, the prosecution of the “Pussy Riot” art group members is a violation of artists’ rights to free expression. Zabyelina, Y., & Ivashkiv, R. Pussy Riot and the Politics of Resistance in Contemporary Russia. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology. Retrieved on 18 October 2022.

[2] See Report on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cultures and cultural rights: https://www.ohchr.org/en/calls-for-input/report-impact-covid-19-pandemic-cultures-and-cultural-rights [published: 04.02.2021, accessed on 18 October 2022].

[3] In Belarus, violations of cultural rights are mainly monitored by Belarus PEN. See, for example, the organization’s special project the Chronicle of Human Rights Violation in the Cultural Sphere: https://penbelarus.org/en/tag/chronicle [verified on 18 October 2022].

[4] See Damaged cultural sites in Ukraine verified by UNESCO: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/damaged-cultural-sites-ukraine-verified-unesco [Published and verified on 18 October 2022].

[5] See the European Parliament resolution of 10 March 2022: https://oeil.secure.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/summary.do?id=1696840&t=e&l=en [verified on 18 October 2022]

[6] Armenia signed this optional protocol immediately after its appearance, in September 2009, and the ratification took place in 2020. See the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=IV-3-a&chapter=4&clang=_en [verified on 18 October 2022]

[7] H. Porsdam, O. Reitov, Cultural Rights Manual, New Democracy Fund, 2022. P. 7.

[8] Kukathas, C. (1992). Are there any Cultural Rights? Political Theory, 20(1), 105–139.

[9] Levy, Jacob T., ‘Classifying Cultural Rights’, The Multiculturalism of Fear (Oxford, 2000; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Nov. 2003).

[10] Lury, C. (2002). Cultural Rights: Technology, Legality and Personality. Routledge.

[11] See the full text of Armenia’s Copyright Law at https://www.aipa.am/u_files/file/Laws/CopyrightLawch.pdf [verified on 18 October 2022].

[12] https://womenofarmenia.org/publications-research-old/

[13] In 2022, Armenia continues to be among the most homophobic countries, with the regional track record of tolerance to LGBTQ+ people surpassing only Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Iran. See, for instance, https://rainbow-europe.org [verified on 18 October 2022].

[14] A recent report by the Geneva Women’s Resource Center specifically examines cases of women discrimination, rights violations, and taking lives of women living in Nagorno-Karabakh or in the border areas between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Given that we consider the right to education and the right to participate in cultural life to be fundamental cultural rights, the displacement, physical damage, and other consequences of the war have precisely caused violations of these women’s cultural rights. See Impact of 2020 Artsakh War and the Post-War Situation on Women’s Basic Rights.

[15] This and the annual reports starting from 2011 can be found on the official website of the organization at https://www.pinkarmenia.org/en/publications/report/ [verified on 18 October 2022].

[16] The need to reflect the issues of homophobia and transphobia in the Criminal Code is already discussed in the 2016 report of the Commission against Racism and Intolerance: https://rm.coe.int/fourth-report-on-armenia-armenian-translation-/16808b5538 [verified on 18 October 2022].

[17] Gender Analysis of the Cultural Field in Armenia, CSN Lab 2021.

[18] See “Women belong in the Revolution?!” | A study on gender equality in Armenian politics https://www.crrc.am/blog/women-belong-in-the-revolution-a-study-on-gender-equality-in-armenian-politics/ [verified on 18 October 2022].

[19] It should be noted that this is the first time the Armenian pavilion has been curated by a female curator from the Republic of Armenia: earlier, in 2015, when the Golden Lion of the Biennale went to the Armenian pavilion, Adelina Cüberyan von Fürstenberg, an Armenian from the diaspora, was the curator.

[20] See the statement of the pavilion at the ACSL website at https://acsl.am/the-pavilion-of-the-republic-of-armenia/ [verified on 18 October 2022].

[21] Over 23,000 Sign Petition to Save Cinema Moscow Summer Theatre https://hetq.am/en/article/44010 [verified on 18 October 2022].

[22] Galstyan V. The ‘Afrikyants’ mansion is being demolished: https://ouryerevan.com/?p=1313 [verified on 18 October 2022].

[23] Yerevan: Demonstrators Oppose Demolition of Firdous Neighbourhood https://hetq.am/en/article/118277 [verified on 18 October 2022].

[24] Immediately Stop the Destruction of Firdus District https://armenianweekly.com/2020/06/19/immediately-stop-the-destruction-of-firdus-district/ [verified on 18 October 2022].

[25] We gave a detailed account of this in Firdus: The Memory of a Place — collective monograph ed. by T. Amiryan, S. Kalantaryan — CSN lab, Yerevan, 2019.

[26] Overall, 58 events were held including celebrations, of which 15 were speeches and discussions in Russian. In the programme of the book fair there was no information that the events would be held in Russian. See the full programme of the Fair at https://www.evnbookfest.com/en?fbclid=IwAR3Iz3enSCRN8pyoAqw3ncRwqTuYPvhKrn83HjZtL-H7O-SofFisQuHiAaTM [verified on 18 October 2022].

[27] We mentioned this together with the anthropologist A. Sokolova in the article: Amiryan, T., Sokolova, A. Relocated Russian Democracy – A View from Armenia: https://ge.boell.org/en/2022/06/01/relocated-russian-democracy-view-armenia [verified on 18 October 2022].

[28] See, for example, Ahmeteli N. Will Russian Become an Official Language in Armenia?: https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-42427481 [verified on 18 October 2022].

[29] See more in the special research report of Freedom House in Armenia for 2021: https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2021-07/Disinformation-in-Armenia_Am-final.pdf [verified on 18 October 2022].

[30] See Armenian Government Wants To Expand Russian-Language Education: https://www.azatutyun.am/a/31799116.html [verified on 18 October 2022].