Event On May 3, Armenia, along with the rest of the world, celebrated World Press Freedom Day. Two days earlier, Freedom House, the New-York based NGO which promotes freedom around the world, released a list of countries ranked by the degree of media freedom in each. Armenia is included among the “Not Free” countries, and ranks 151, along with Singapore. In a previous Freedom House report, Armenia was in 144th place, near Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, the Maldives, Moldova and Pakistan.

Event March 22 marked the deadline for political parties to register to compete in Yerevan’s first direct popular elections for Yerevan City Council. The election will take place on May 31. The leader of the victorious party will become the mayor of Yerevan. Six political parties registered: The Republican Party, the Prosperous Armenia party, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation – Dashnaktsutyun, the Rule of Law party, the People’s Party, and the Socialist Labor Party, as did the Armenian National Congress, the assembly of several political parties, led by former president, Levon Ter-Petrossian. The only opposition party represented in Parliament, led by Raffi Hovannisian, chose not to participate, following long and quasi-public negotiations with the Ter-Petrossian team.

Event As a result of the last discussion on the situation in Armenia, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) did not impose sanctions, but Armenia ‘gained’ one more resolution.

Background In December 2008, the PACE Monitoring Group decided that at the PACE winter session in January 2009, PACE should discuss whether to deprive the Armenian delegation of its right to vote, since Armenia had not registered any substantive progress in implementing the provisions of PACE resolutions 1609 and 1620 that negatively assessed the political situation in the wake of the March 1 post-election crackdown. One day before the scheduled discussion, however, the   rapporteurs proposed that the issue not be raised in the plenary session of PACE, basing that recommendation on their visit to Armenia in mid-January. Instead, the session adopted yet another resolution -- number 1643 -- extending until the April PACE session the deadline for the Armenian authorities to comply with the demands contained in the two earlier resolutions.