Author: Vicken Chmshkian

Starting November 9, 2015, the U.S. Embassy in Armenia will be changing its visa procedures to make it easier for approved visa applicants to pick up their visas and for certain current visa holders to renew their visas. There is no additional cost for this improved service.

Starting on November 9, approved visa applicants will no longer have to return to the Embassy to pick up their passport containing their visa. Rather, all approved applicants will pick up their passports with their visas from UMAKS, the DHL representative in Armenia, located at 27 Amiryan St. in Yerevan. Applicants told during their visa interview that they were approved, will later receive an e-mail notification that their visa is ready for pick up at the Amiryan location. Applicants can also designate third parties to pick up their passports for them. More details will be available at .

“We know it can be difficult to get to the Embassy,” Consul Frank Tu said. “We hope our visa applicants will find this process easier. For no additional fee, they will be able to stroll over to the DHL office on Amiryan and pick up their approved visas. We aim to make the visa application procedure as simple and easy as possible.”

Some individuals, those who have previously had visas and meet certain requirements for interview-free visa renewal, will also be able to renew their visas by dropping their application packets off at the Amiryan DHL office after submitting the on-line application and paying the regular visa application fee. If approved, these applicants will receive a notification e-mail to return to DHL to pick up their new visas. For more information on who qualifies for interview-free visa renewal, visit the Embassy website: .

Even those applicants who come to the Embassy for an interview and are asked to provide additional documents, will be able to submit those documents via the DHL location, eliminating the need for additional trips to the Embassy.

This change affects all applicants scheduled for interviews after November 9. No additional fee is required to be paid at the DHL office, as the service is covered by the regular visa application fee, which is not changing.

 

 

 

The Sunday elections were Erdogan’s victory and Turkey’s defeat, Ruben Safrastyan, Director of the Oriental Studies Institute of the Armenian National Academy of Sciences, told reporters today.

According to him, Turkey has found itself in a hard situation. “Turkey’s isolation is obvious,” Safrastyan said. “Turkey has problems with almost all countries of the region – Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Syria.”

Ruben Safrstyan rules out the perspective of Turkey becoming the country with the hugest weight in a region uniting the Islamic world.

“The internal and external discrepancies will further deepen as a result of the elections,” Safrastyan said.

Eighty percent of minorities in Turkey say they cannot express themselves openly on social media, while 35 percent said they are subject to hate speech on the same platform, according to a recent survey conducted by a minority organization funded by the European Union, the reports.

Four-fifths of minorities with Greek, Armenian, Jewish and Syriac origins said they could not freely express their ideas on social media, according to the survey conducted by the Yeniköy Panayia Greek Orthodox Church, Bilgi University and the Konda pollster company.

The survey was conducted among 746 Turkish citizens who are members of the Greek, Armenian, Jewish and Syriac communities between Jan. 30 and April 17.

Only 20 percent of the respondents said they felt free to share their thoughts on social media, while the rest said they did not share their real opinions on social media due to fear and concerns. The respondents said the social media platforms they used most commonly were Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, respectively.

Some 86 percent of the minorities said they used their real name on social media accounts, while only 2 percent used a nickname. Twelve percent said they used both.

Over one-third of respondents also said they were subject to defamation, humiliation, obscenity or threats due to their minority identity on social media.

The survey revealed that, even though minorities cannot express themselves freely on social media, some 60 percent of minorities in Turkey believe that social media has enhanced their relationship with the rest of the society.

Out of the 746 respondents, 35 percent said they were Jewish, 27 percent said they were Armenian, 18 percent Syriac and 15 percent Greek.

Eighty percent also said Turkey needed legal measures that would penalize the violation of rights and discrimination on social media.

Professor Ulaş Karan, who compiled a report comparing and contrasting the differences in Turkish and European Union legal regulations regarding religious minorities and social media in Turkey as part of the project, said minorities were often exposed to hate speech on social media but that such acts were not subjected to prosecution.

“The definition of hate speech of the Council of Europe needs to be in our [Turkish] legislation,” said Karan.

Article 216 of the Turkish Penal Code interdicts those who instigate the public toward grudges and hostility, but the clause is not invoked when it comes to minorities, Karan said.

“This should also be implemented in hate speech against minorities,” Karan said.

The Tuzla Armenian orphanage camp “Kamp Armen”, seized in 1980s by Turkish state, was restituted to the Armenian community last week. Nor Zartonk, an NGO founded by Armenian young people in Turkey, took part in the struggle for the return of Kamp Armen.

“If we wanted to erect an Armenian Genocide monument in Turkey, there would be no need for that. Kamp Armen stands there like a monument of the Armenian genocide,” Sayat Tekir from Nor Zartonk said in an interview with .

“Many people participated in the Kamp Armen resistance and these were people who had not come to the fore in the political arena before. The resistance politicized the people. We turned Kamp Armen into a space in which everything concerning Armenians could be talked about. We held panel discussions there, we organized activities about culture and history, we kept it constantly alive,” Tekir said.

He said there were two attacks on the hundredth and hundred and twenty first day of the resistance. “Especially because the atmosphere in the country changed after the elections, because nationalism and other racist inclinations had increased drastically, Kamp Armen became a target.”

Kogalymavia confirmed on Monday that a Russian airliner’s tail part had been damaged prior to the air crash in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Sputnik News reports.

After the tail part of the Airbus A321 plane had sustained damages, the airliner was repaired. The technical condition of the plane was normal, Kogalymavia officials said.

External forces are the only possible reason of the deadly crash, Kogalymavia officials said Monday. Kogalymavia 7K9268 flight likely suffered substantial damages when it started to fall, officials said.

The Kogalymavia plane’s crew completely lost control over the aircraft as the disaster started to unfold.

However, the crashed Russian airliner had passed all necessary tests, the company’s top manager said Monday.

Armenian Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan had a meeting with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev on the sidelines of the sitting of the CIS Council of Heads of State in Tajikistan.

The Armenian and Russian Prime Ministers discussed a number of issues on the agenda of bilateral allied partnership.

Hovik Abrahamyan and Dmitry Medvedev attached importance to the active cooperation with a view of development and expansion of commercial-economic ties and referred to joint programs and steps in different spheres.

On October 30, on the margins of the meeting of the Council of CIS Heads of Government, Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan met with Prime Minister of Tajikistan Kohir Rasulzoda in Dushanbe.

During the meeting, the two prime ministers discussed a number of issues of mutual interest. They stressed the need for closer cooperation in economic, humanitarian and other spheres, as well as in the framework of international organizations.

Coming to trade and economic relations, the parties pointed to the need for revitalizing the activities of the intergovernmental commission through practical steps that will bring about tangible growth in bilateral trade turnover.

The Heads of Government of Armenia and Tajikistan considered it important to expand and deepen cooperation in bilateral and multilateral formats.

Israel is interested in signing an agreement on the free trade zone with the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) as soon as possible, the country’s Minister of Immigrant Absorption, Zeev Elkin, told Russian reporters on Wednesday, TASS reports.

“We believe that this has a big potential also for Israel’s economy and there may be also the interest for the countries part of the Customs Union,” said the minister, who also co-chairs the Russian-Israeli inter-governmental commission.

“I think there is no reason to delay this,” he said.

Israel has given “high priority” to the talks on the free trade zone with the EEU, Elkin said. “We are sincerely interested in doing this efficiently to the maximum level, and we propose that the Russian side should launch talks already in early 2016 and hold at least two rounds of negotiations in 2016,” he said.

The Israeli politician said it is difficult to forecast the exact date for reaching the deal. “This depends on the number of difficult issues but as a rule if the work is normal, then it is possible to reach signing such an agreement in two years,” he said.

“For our part, we will do our utmost so that this happens as soon as possible,” the minister stressed.

The Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) is the economic bloc which came into force in January 2015 and now consists of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

The requirements set by the RA Government in case of Perincek v. Switzerland were fully satisfied by the European Court, the Armenian Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement.

In a judgment delivered today the European Court said Switzerland had violated Turkish politician Dogu Perincek’s right to freedom of speech by convicting him for denying that the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 amounted to genocide.

Armenia was involved in the case as a third party. “By intervening in the case as a third party, the Republic of Armenia expected the European Court to exclude all kind of wording that would in any way question the fact of the Armenian Genocide,” the statement reads.

“In the judgment delivered today the European Court underlined that it was neither required to answer that question, nor did it have the authority to make legally binding pronouncements on whether the 1915 mass killing and deportation of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire amounted to genocide as defined by international law,” the Prosecutor General’s Office said.

The Court declared that Armenians have “the right to respect for their and their ancestors’ dignity including their right to respect for their identity constructed around the understanding that their community has suffered genocide.”

Finally, as regards the Perincek case, the Court ruled that subjecting him to criminal penalty did not fully contradict the European case law. Instead, it confirmed that  the Swiss law had been applied wrongly.

“Therefore, the criminalization of the Armenian Genocide and the criminal penalty is considered lawful. However, this should be done exceptionally in compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights,” the Armenian Prosecutor General’s Office said.

“Thus, all requirements set by the Armenian Government in case of Perincek v. Switzerland were fully satisfied by the European Court,” the statement concluded.

Indonesia’s Aviastar airline said on Friday contact had been lost with a Twin Otter small passenger aircraft travelling between Masamba and Makassar on the island of Sulawesi.

Ten people were on board the aircraft, Wisnu Darjono, an official at Indonesia’s flight safety agency told Reuters. He confirmed authorities had lost contact with the aircraft.

Indonesian authorities have launched a search for the plane.

The Transportation Ministry said a search has begun for the aircraft that lost contact on a flight from the town of Masamba, about 30 minutes before its was scheduled to land in Makassar city.

“It was around 60 nautical miles from Makassar,” ministry spokesman J.R. Barata told MetroTV. “We have now started a search.”

“Most importantly, we will work out its position first,” Barata said adding that 10 people – seven passengers and three crew – were on board.

Aviastar, which flies domestic routes, said it had lost contact with the aircraft in the mid-afternoon and it had then contacted search authorities.