We continue to talk about the legal framework in the countries of our region, which we evaluate every year to check the availability of laws related to SOGI and HIV.

We present the analysis of the legislation of Armenia for 2022.

The analysis of legal practice in Armenia includes both judicial practice and government statistics, but also reports submitted by activists, information and statistics of human rights organizations, press reports and reports of non-governmental organizations to international bodies.

The goal of the analysis is to identify legal barriers and problems in those areas where the necessary legislation already exists, but it does not fully ensure the implementation of the rights and freedoms for LGBT people.

The analysis was carried out according to the methodology developed by ECOM experts. Our local partners in Armenia completed the corresponding questionnaire.

As a result, we identified the main restrictions that still remain for LGBT people in the legislation of Armenia. Namely:

The country has not yet created a clear and understandable step-by-step procedure for legal transgender transition and medical procedures associated with it. The procedure for changing the gender marker in the documents is tied to the requirement to provide a medical certificate of transition. At the same time, there is no procedure for issuing such certificates and no list of required medical procedures to obtain such a certificate.
Neither the Constitution nor the Family Code of Armenia provide for any opportunities to exercise equal rights to private and family life for same-sex couples. Such relationships are not regulated in any way, as in other countries of the region.
There is no direct ban on child adoption for LGBT people, however, according to the Family Code, unmarried people cannot jointly adopt the same child.

At the same time, the Criminal Code of the Republic of Armenia was revised in 2021 and entered into force in 2022. There is an important change in the new version of the code: the list of protected grounds for hate crimes is open, which means that it is possible to open criminal cases for crimes motivated by homophobia and transphobia.

Armenia also has a law "On Freedom of Assembly", which provides for a notification procedure for holding peaceful assemblies. This makes it possible to organize rallies in support of the rights and freedoms of the LGBT community. However, according to reports from local non-governmental organizations, there have been no attempts in the past few years to hold a mass and open peaceful rally in support of the rights of LGBT people.

The analysis is available in English and Russian.