President Serzh Sargsyan holds session of National Security Council

Today, there took place a session of the National Security Council (NSC) of the Republic of Armenia which was chaired by RA President Serzh Sargsyan, President of the National Security Council.

In his opening remarks to the participants of the session the President noted: “For about a quarter century, our state has been following a difficult path to establishing democratic institutions. Our statehood building has been anchored in the rule of law, freedom of speech, political pluralism and other fundamental principles which have never been called into question. Unfortunately, there was a time when these principles were of declarative nature and did not coincide with realty. At the same time, we have been always aware of the fact that there are values which are beyond private, group, partisan and other interests. Among them one of the most vital ones is the maintenance of tranquility and solidarity in our country which is becoming more valuable in light of current regional and geopolitical developments.

The preservation of this value by itself supposes presence of political struggle and implementation of other democratic measures to ensure expression and protection of various interests.

However, recent times have seen certain individuals’ intentions and attempts to take their agenda items out of the political domain and use other ways to deal with them. Until now, the characterization of respective actions and their analyses were more of political nature.

I think that the time has come for us to discuss such actions and the related phenomena from a national security perspective. Our task is to assess how dangerous the present threats are for the vital interests of a person, the society and the state, as well as to develop a common approach to the measures aimed neutralizing those threats.

It does not mean, however, that the state did not adopt a certain attitude toward a number of important issues pertaining to the normal functioning of the society and is taking up a new stance on them.

Particularly, the state has never encouraged grinding out ambiguous propaganda aimed at violence and whether it was successful or not, though it is not important at the moment, it has sought to tackle illegal finance, has somehow addressed the phenomenon which involves using suspicious financial resources to achieve political goals and has regularly counteracted the disproportionate use of technical and organizational means to protect private interests.

Of course, all of this is the constituent part of the everyday activities carried out by authorized government agencies. However, when such negative phenomena are mobilized and used to serve the interests endangering the country’s national security, we must treat it quite differently. Today, we will discuss how we are going to behave.”

As a result of the discussions held at the NSC session, the participants adopted a common position on assessing the national security threats and taking measures that would match their degree of dangerousness. The NSC members unanimously agreed that any measures aimed at neutralizing national security threats must correspond to law and justice.