Renovated parliament session hall has at least 3 inconvenient conditions, say journalists

The renovated session hall of Armenia’s National Assembly is not comfortable for journalists’ work. No full sound and video record is technically possible to make to cover what is happening in the parliament, Tert.am’s correspondent says.

More importantly, the new conditions have deprived the journalists of the once direct access to MPs. Therefore, they can no longer take comments and short interviews from MPs in the session hall.

Those journalists discontent with the new unfavorable working conditions at the parliament expressed their dissatisfaction to the Head of Staff of the National Assembly Gegham Gharibjanyan who promised them to pass their complaints to the NA Chairman Hovik Abrahamyan, saying he hoped they will be solved in the next four-day session.

Now the journalists have to follow the parliament's working sessions from specifically equipped boxes from behind sound-resisting windows.

Besides those boxes are far from the entrances to the session hall which makes it difficult for them to come up to the MPs and ask for comments and short interviews. 

It has also turned out during today’s four-day session that the journalists are having difficulties even in the boxes: they cannot follow what is happening in the hall as they can see only those parts of the hall where the chairman and his deputies sit. And to see what happens in the hall the journalists have to be standing all through the session.

But these are not all the inconveniences of the renovated session hall of Armenia’s parliament: journalists cannot record what the MPs say during the session and to do so they have to again stand all through the session’s duration (6 hours) and hold their recorders to the loudspeakers installed on the wall.

The renovation of the parliament's session hall has cost Armenian taxpayers more than $1.3 million USD.