The Human Rights Defender has received 254 complaints about the 9th action aimed at minimizing the economic impact of COVID-19 in Armenia. 93 of the complaints were received by 116 hotline number.
The Human Rights Defender's Office discussed the issues raised by the citizens both orally and in writing, as well as conducted monitoring of the media.
The issues recorded by the Human Rights Defender with regard to the actions aimed at addressing the economic and social impact of COVID-19 will be presented separately.
• The 9th support action to address the economic impact of COVID-19
The beneficiaries of the action were families with children under the age of 18, where both parents did not have a registered job and met a number of other conditions.
From the start of the action, that is, from April 14 to June 25, the investigation of the complaints addressed to the Human Rights Defender revealed issues that are mainly related to the following:
• lack of access to Internet and technical means;
• lack of skills to use Internet;
• difficulties with using the system, entering the data by the beneficiaries;
• rejections by the system of persons that were obvious beneficiaries;
• delays in transferring the one-time financial assistance, etc.
For example, according to a number of complaints addressed to the Human Rights Defender, citizens entered the required information about their children in the system, but the system rejected the application for not being registered in the state register of the population. According to the complaints, the children were in Armenia and were registered in their permanent residence address.
In another case, the citizens reported that they were registered at the place of residence of a family receiving social benefit (for example, at the father's house), but in fact they lived in other place. In this case, the online application system of the social security service considered the applicants as members of a family receiving social benefit, despite the fact that in the family social vulnerability assessment system, the applicants were listed as "absent members". As a result, applicants were automatically rejected to receive the support.
There have also been cases when the child's parents were deprived of the state support due to the import of a car into Armenia. The issue was that when importing a car, a tax account was opened in the tax authority in the name of the parent, as a result of which the system considered the parent as a private entrepreneur or employee, due to which the family was not able to benefit from the action.
A study of complaints addressed to the Human Rights Defender shows that people often benefit from the action partially. The system did not confirm the data of all the children or confirmed all of them, but the financial support was transferred to the bank not for all children.
The Defender also discussed complaints when a particular family was a beneficiary of the 9th action, so a family member submitted an application to the online application system of the social security service months ago and the latter was confirmed. However, the financial support was not provided to the family because it had not been transferred to the bank.
The Human Rights Defender's Office has taken an individual approach to each of the issues raised in the framework of the discussion of individual complaints related to the Government's anti-crisis economic and social actions.
They were raised and resolved in cooperation with relevant state bodies. Such an approach provided an opportunity to provide effective assistance both to concrete individuals in benefiting from the actions and to the state in solving systemic problems.
As a result of the cooperation between the Human Rights Defender and the relevant state bodies, most of the issues related to the obstacles to benefiting from the 9th action have been solved.
It should be noted, that at the initial stage of the launch of 9th action, the Government's relevant decision did not consider guardians of children as beneficiaries of the action.
The results of both the monitoring and the discussion of the complaints were regularly summarized and presented to the RA Government in order to improve those actions and solve the problems that arise for the people. Based on the Defender's recommendations, the necessary amendments were made, which eliminated the above-mentioned obstacles.
The Human Rights Defender welcomes that the obstacles requiring legal regulation have been eliminated in the shortest possible time.
At the same time, it is concerning that the organizational and technical barriers to the action whose main beneficiaries are children, have not been completely eliminated so far for the citizens facing many social problems due to the State of Emergency declared in Armenia. The state should implement all the actions with the most favorable solutions for the people.
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