News - PM: Armenia stopped Corruption Perceptions Index decline, even made little progress in 2023

Last year, we suffered a regression in Transparency International organization's Corruption Perceptions Index; we addressed it at the government meeting, and now we can say that this year we have stopped the regression, and we have even taken a small step forward. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated this during the Cabinet meeting of the Armenian government Thursday. "In the [latest] report of Transparency International organization, I specifically noted the following line: ‘Despite the fact that Armenia, like many other countries in the region, faces security threats, it has sufficient potential to overcome these difficulties and implement an effective policy to make corruption risks more manageable.’ This is a very objective sentence. If we translate [it], this means that by facing our security challenges of the previous period, a context was formed that this is not the most important issue, we should deal with security issues. But I also want to remind that we publicly agreed that our correct work is not to deviate from our strategic agendas. "Today, many countries and international organizations are recording the extraordinary manifestations of our resilience. It is only thanks to the fact that even in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, our reform agenda did not stop for a single minute," said Pashinyan. He noted that in 2018, a lot of progress was made in Armenia in fighting corruption, but then this progress stopped or slowed down. “One of the reasons for this is that the more progress you make, further progress becomes more difficult. But this cannot leave our agenda for any reason. The will of the government's anticorruption policy has not decreased by a single millimeter since May 2018; on the contrary, it has increased. It is another matter that what could be achieved mostly or mainly due to political will, we have already achieved in practice. Now we have to do the substantive work of purely institutional reforms," said Pashinyan. He noted that it is not necessary to trust the reports that reach the Armenian government. "We should personally go and test the important projects. If we don't do that, nothing will happen," added the Armenian premier.