On December 9, International Anti-Corruption Day, Transparency International Anticorruption Centre (TIAC) issued a statement regarding Armenia's progress in fighting corruption.

The Armenian chapter of Transparency International stressed the importance of the government’s ambitious program of anti-corruption reforms while raising concern about the current negative trends and problematic manifestations in Armenia that question the fight against corruption, its efficiency, and even the political will. 

TIAC also highlighted that the anti-corruption reforms were slowed down given the challenges that Armenia has faced since 2020, including security threats, the coronavirus pandemic, and internal political tensions. 

“We can argue that the current challenges related to corruption are the failure of the mechanisms of checks and balances of the branches of government, problems of formation and integrity of law enforcement and judicial bodies, the appointment of persons with dubious biographies to high-level positions and manifestations of patronage, problematic public procurement and suspicious successes of persons affiliated to high-ranking officials in tenders, trends of convergence of politics with big business, threats of shrinking of civil space, particularly in the mining industry, general non-transparent, non-participative and non-accountable governance and the formation of new corruption schemes. These issues are currently episodic, but they can quickly deepen and form a new system of state capture, which is unacceptable,” the statement noted. 

The organization called on the Armenian government to seriously reevaluate its actions and failures in fighting corruption and immediately take effective and efficient steps to restore public trust. 

It is worth mentioning that on the 2021 Corruptions Perceptions Index (CPI), Armenia has a score of 49/100, earning a rank of 58 out of 180 countries. The score of 49 is a considerable improvement over its score of 35 in 2018. An increase of 14 points was the best result on a global scale. Such an increase indicates that Armenia is perceived to have made significant progress in tackling public sector corruption since 2018. However, Armenia’s score on the CPI has not changed since 2020.