Zhoghovurd newspaper of the Republic of Armenia (RA) writes as follows, in part: Diplomatic passports of Armenia, which used to be received by famous athletes or those representing Armenia on various platforms, were collected several years ago. Zhoghovurd daily has received information that in recent years, diplomatic passports have been distributed to government officials or people close to the government, in an untold number.
We tried to verify the information from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs [(MFA)] and had asked them to answer very specific demanding questions.
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We received the following response from the RA MFA:
The information on the number of RA diplomatic passports is an official secret of limited distribution, which is not subject to publication in accordance with Article 1 of the RA Law "On State Secrets".
Article 49 of the RA Law "On Diplomatic Service" defines the scope of persons entitled to receive RA diplomatic passport.
During 2018, 399 diplomatic passports were issued. Information on other periods is not subject to publication for the reason mentioned in point 1.
The issued diplomatic passport is taken back and invalidated in cases of elimination of the basis defined by Article 49 of the RA Law "On Diplomatic Service," for which no separate record is kept.
According to part 2 of the same law, diplomatic passports are issued to persons not mentioned in part 1 of this article with the permission of the prime minister.
Following the references of the ministry's law, we did not find a section that clearly defines that the number of diplomatic passports is a state secret, but in some points it can simply be placed, but there is no clear definition in the references mentioned by the ministry regarding diplomatic passports.
It turns out that 399 diplomatic passports were distributed in the year of the revolution alone, and the ministry apparently did not provide the data for other years, hiding the reality from 3 million prime ministers.
But in fact, in many cases, diplomatic passports were given to such persons from the [ruling] CC [i.e. the Civil Contract Party] circles that they would not be able to have it even in their wildest dreams.
