Parliamentary hearings on “New Perspectives and Challenges of Armenia’s European Integration” have started in the National Assembly.
Arman Yeghoyan, Chairman of the Standing Committee on European Integration of the National Assembly, said that Armenia went through a phase of relations in the 2000s when the EU had its most significant expansion. “10 Eastern European countries became EU members at once. At that time, the EU started the European neighborhood policy, and then the Eastern partnership policy, and Armenia participated in both. I must say that quite active work has been done in the Eastern Partnership format. And it was during this period that the Armenian government also started negotiations on the association agreement with the EU.”
According to him, these were new standard agreements.
The deputy noted that although the European side told Armenia that it had made progress in those negotiations, due to the events of September 2013, Armenia refused to sign this agreement and became a member of the Customs Union. Yeghoyan reminded me that after those events, an agreement was signed from which the provision on free trade was removed.
This agreement is somewhat underestimated in our society and expert circles. If all the existing contract provisions are implemented, Armenia’s European integration process will take several steps forward. This is the same agreement that Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine had, without the section on free trade,” said the deputy.
